MARIN GENERAL HOSPITAL: Providing Comprehensive Service to the Community

Jeffrey “Jim” Dietz, MD

The Emergency Department at Marin General Hospital is proud to provide outstanding, comprehensive care to our community. Like the other departments at our hospital—some of which offer services, including neurosurgery, OB, psychiatry, pediatrics and cardiac surgery, that are not available elsewhere in the county—we are blessed to have an excellent medical staff and a dedicated corps of nurses and other staff members.

When the current Emergency Department opened in 1991, it seemed cavernous compared to the tiny facility we had been using before that. In the 25 years since then, the limitations of this space have become increasingly apparent. As the services we offer have grown in number and complexity, the physical plant, in response, has expanded in piecemeal fashion. Not only do we now feel the current space is inadequate to our patients’ needs, but we realize that the geometry of our campus is less than ideal. For instance, a trip to the CT scanner involves an elevator ride and passage down a long hallway. And, although our door-to-cath-lab time for acute STEMI averages 45 minutes (half the national average), that trip involves an even longer transport of a critical patient.

We are also keen on our patients’ experiences of care. Five years ago we opened our Rapid Medical Evaluation (RME) area, which has improved patient flow and decreased wait times. We have opened a new patient reception area (what used to be called a waiting room) and remodeled provider and patient care areas to make them more efficient, comfortable and attractive.

But the big news is that in four years we will be moving into an Emergency Department that has been designed as part of MGH 2.0, our new hospital! In the new Marin General Hospital, the Emergency Department will be three times its current size. Each patient room will be private with walls and sliding glass doors, and twice as large as current treatment areas. No more gurneys separated by curtains! Each room will be equipped with state-of-the-art technology, ergonomically installed, so that physicians and staff can provide safe and efficient care.

We have placed an emphasis on patient experience so the space is designed to shield patients and their families from unnecessary sensory experience—those sights, sounds and smells that can make an Emergency Department visit far more uncomfortable than it needs to be.

For patients who come in under special circumstances, such as those who need to be accompanied by security or law enforcement, we will have a separate entrance area and an isolated treatment area. From the Ebola scare, we have learned a great deal about the importance of isolation and have created two appropriately sized and configured treatment areas should such an epidemic come to the Bay Area. We have also designed safe holding areas for psychiatric patients, whose needs are quite different from others we treat in the Emergency Department.

What is really exciting to me is that the entire structure of MGH 2.0 is designed so that there are proper adjacencies of services. Accessing the CT scanner (actually two) and other diagnostic imaging services will require passing through just one set of doors. The trip to the cardiac cath lab will shrink to less than a minute.

It has been my privilege to have been a part of the Emergency Department team at Marin General Hospital for the past 27 years. We have, during that time, expanded our services and provided state-of-the-art, comprehensive care to the patients we serve. I am confident that MGH 2.0 will be an important enhancement to the well-being of the people of Marin.

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Dr. Dietz is medical director of Emergency Services and chair of Emergency Medicine at Marin General Hospital.
Email: jeffrey.dietz@maringeneral.org