NEWPORT – For most of the year, Newport Hospital is a community hospital like any other in Rhode Island, caring for Aquidneck Island residents, delivering their babies, doing surgeries, handling emergencies, and providing a wide range of community-based services. But in the summer, Newport’s population grows dramatically – and the 129-bed hospital gets extra-busy.
Karen Smith, R.N., director of emergency services, spoke with PBN about the seasonal change of pace in Newport Hospital’s emergency room, which gets a little more than 30,000 visits per year.
1) How much does your ER patient volume change between, say, March and July?
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We see about 2,500 patients a month in the winter, and in the summer about 3,000 a month, so there’s an increase of about 20 percent during the summer season.
2) In the off-season, what are the three or four biggest reasons people come to the ER?
By far the most common complaint is abdominal pain, and in the off season we also see a high number of patients who are having chest pain and shortness of breath.
3) How does that change in the summer?
In the summer, abdominal pain is still the complaint we see most often, but we also receive many patients who have come to us as a result of outdoor activities. For example, we see a lot of sports injuries, and when the temperature is very high we see an increase in the number of patients who come in because they are dehydrated but don’t realize it.
4) How do you switch gears in the ER to deal with the change? Do you staff a lot more, change your staffing mix, change your setup?
Even though we see more patients in the summer, the patients we see during the off season are more ill – they usually have medical conditions that require more care than the treatment of an injury, for instance. Because of this higher acuity, we need just as many staff in the winter as we do in the summer, when we see lower acuity patients but more of them.
5) How big a factor is alcohol in your ER caseload, off season and during the summer?
Alcohol abuse is a problem for our emergency department every day and at any hour of the day. It increases a little in the summer, of course, with more people here on vacation, but because we serve a broad variety of populations all year long, there is never a period when we could say that alcohol use or abuse isn’t an important factor or doesn’t affect the patient volume. It’s always there.
