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Ellis Medicine Opens New Emergency Center

Lucas Willard
/
WAMC

A state-of-the-art emergency center has opened at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady.

With 61 rooms, a redesigned waiting area, and new equipment, the Neil and Jane Golub Center for Emergency Care was dedicated at a ceremony Wednesday morning. 

JoAnne McDonough is chair of Emergency Care at Ellis Medicine.

“It’s a football field and you’ll see this when we open this and cut the ribbon, but I think we’re all getting a little more exercise walking around this space.”

McDonough said each room has enough room for a stretcher and the new department allows for more efficient service.

“Each room has any life-saving technology that we need to do the best care we can get, we have the cardiac monitoring in any room. We can do anything in any room in this department. Also new for us has been a designated CT and digital X-Ray within the department so we don’t have to take critically ill people out of the department for necessary tests.”

Neil and Jane Golub of the company that runs the Price Chopper grocery chain serve as trustees for the Foundation for Ellis Medicine.

Jane was asked to lead the $25 million fundraising campaign for the new emergency center.

“I mean, that’s an awful lot of money when you’re accountable for raising it. And I said, ‘You keep us alive and healthy for the next two years, and we’ll raise the $25 million. Well they did! We’re alive, we’re healthy, thank goodness, and we raised $26.1 million.”

The new facility is Schenectady’s dedicated emergency center.

It’s also the final step in the hospital’s long restructuring process that began in 2006.

Then, the Berger Commission issued a report calling for the right-sizing of hospitals across New York. Included in its recommendations was the closure of Bellevue Woman’s Center and St. Clare’s, also in Schenectady.

Paul Milton is president and CEO of Ellis Medicine.

“Schenectady was an area of focus and the mandate set in to motion set in place a series of historic events for healthcare in our community.”

Neil Golub, at the time, served as chairman of the board at Bellevue.

“And we really had a hard job  to convince the Commission on Health in New York State that was a bad idea because Ellis had dropped their OB/GYN years earlier so we really had a battle on our hands.”

But Golub called the report and eventual consolidation of the three hospitals a blessing in disguise.

“Maybe we don’t recognize it today, but I tell ya, where we were and where we are today is a whole different place.”

Ellis gears the Bellevue campus toward women and infants; meanwhile, St. Clare’s serves as an outpatient center. Inpatient care is focused at Ellis. Ellis opened an emergent care facility in Clifton Park in 2012.

Lucas Willard is a reporter and host at WAMC Northeast Public Radio, which he joined in 2011.
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