Advocate Hearing Today

One of the intermediate steps in the process for bringing a hospital to Round Lake begins today with a hearing in front of the Illinois Hospital Planning Board for Advocate's freestanding immediate care and emergency room.

Advocate recognizes the process is slow for the eventual approval of the hospital and wants to start serving the region and has filed for an intermediate step towards service in the area with an acute and free standing emergency center. What follows here is the text of my testimony in front of the board today at 10 am in the Round Lake Beach Civic Center off of Hook drive.

My name is Bill Gentes and I am the Mayor of Round Lake. I am here today to support Advocate’s application for an Advanced Immediate Care Center, as well as their plans to convert the facility into a Free Standing Emergency Center.

Since becoming Mayor, I have made my mission loud and clear—to increase access to health care in Northwest Lake County and Eastern McHenry County. I started this process by appointing a citizen-driven Hospital Task Force in 2006, which identified the health needs of our surrounding communities.

What they found is no surprise; there is a great need for better access to health care, and in particular, there is an urgent need for nearby access to care in an emergency. Building an Advanced Immediate Care Center and converting it into a Free Standing Emergency Facility is a first step to providing a critical level of service for our community in less than two years time.

A Free Standing Emergency Facility will provide more advanced services to the community, particularly because the facility will be staffed by board certified emergency medicine physicians twenty-four hours a day. As a father of a teenage daughter, I take personal concern for her safety behind the wheel. To know that, if she or a friend happened to have an accident and emergency doctors were close by, it might help me sleep a little better at night.

In all seriousness, this is a great concern to most parents and families I know—realizing that our children might not get the care they need soon enough because an ambulance is stuck in traffic on a long drive to a hospital too many miles away—that’s one worry that should not keep us up at night.

Another major concern that this project will address is that Emergency Departments are overcrowded and wait times to see doctors are increasing. This is not just a Lake County problem---this is a national problem. A recent study evaluated the change in wait times to see an ED physician from 1997 to 2004. During this time period, ED visits increased from 93.4 million to 110.2 million annually, while the number of ED’s fell by as much as 12.4 percent.

In this same time period, the wait time to see an ED physician increased from a median of twenty-two minutes in 1997 to thirty minutes by 2004. Further, patients triaged as “emergent” had median wait times that increased from ten minutes in 1997 to fourteen minutes in 2004.

I applaud the State of Illinois for recognizing this growing epidemic by creating legislation to allow the construction of Free-Standing Emergency Facilities. This allows health care organizations such as Advocate another opportunity to meet the health needs of underserved communities, and the opportunity to help do something about growing wait times in emergency departments.

It’s also easy to see that a medical campus will provide jobs and health security to our neighbors, but an Advocate presence means a commitment to the community, and a commitment to the highest quality of care.

Every citizen in Northwest Lake County and Eastern McHenry county deserves excellent medical care, long-term commitment to the community, and a mission to serve those most in need. I am confident that Advocate can provide this.

I respectfully urge the Planning Board to approve Advocate’s proposal for an Advanced Immediate Care Center, and hope you will also consider approving its conversion to a Free Standing Emergency Center at a later date.