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The unit is the first major step in expanding the hospital's emergency and trauma facilities.

By University Communications
March 4, 2008

University Medical Center will open a new unit this week to serve emergency patients who require several hours of close medical observation, but may not need to be admitted immediately to a scarce inpatient bed.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony of the new, 5,000-square-foot Clinical Decision Unit took place on Monday and the unit, adjacent to the existing Emergency Department, opened to receive patients on Tuesday morning.

A typical CDU patient might be a person who arrives at the emergency room with chest pains. Such a patient would be assessed immediately for heart attack and if initial testing and assessments were negative, the patient then would be transferred to the CDU for further observation, testing and procedures.

If a heart attack was confirmed, the patient would be hospitalized on one of UMC’s inpatient cardiac units. If tests showed the chest pains were just heartburn, muscle pain or other non-cardiac chest pain, the patient would be discharged home.

In the past, such patients could have spent hours in the hospital's crowded emergency department on a gurney as they waited for test results. In the CDU, they will have a comfortable private room, flat-screen TV and the same 1:4 nurse-to-patient ratio as one of UMC’s regular inpatient units, said Kimberly Halloran, patient care manager of the new outpatient unit. It will be open and staffed 24 hours a day.

UMC’s CDU is one of only a handful of such units in Arizona, said Eileen Whalen, vice president for Emergency, Trauma and Perioperative Services.

”The CDU is not an overflow unit for the emergency department, but yes, we hope that these additional 16 beds will relieve some of the congestion and waiting times many of our patients experience in the emergency department,” she said.

UMC treats approximately 60,000 emergency patients and 4,500 trauma patients each year. It operates the only Level 1 trauma center in Southern Arizona.

The Clinical Decision Unit is the first step in a major expansion of the hospital’s emergency and trauma facilities on the ground floor of a new, six-story tower now under construction. The expanded Emergency Department and Trauma Center, slated to open in 2009, will roughly double the number of emergency beds at the hospital.

Construction of the new CDU, which stands on a former ambulance parking area, began approximately a year ago.