CityView Magazine

Local Business JUST FOR T he children’s emergency department celebrated its first anniversary last September with its busiest month ever, not just in the year since the new ED opened but in the past 10-plus years, from the time the hospital first separated sick children from sick adults in the emergency room. That September, the children’s ED saw 4,500 arrivals, an average of 150 patients a day. “If I had my crystal ball,” says Dr. David Smith, a pediatric emergency KIDS Rolling out the red carpet for sick children Story by Cindy Hawkins | Photos by Candace Arnold When Cape Fear Valley Medical Center began to map out what a new emergency room for children might look like, H1N1 was just a series of letters and numbers. Fast forward to fall 2009. Opposite | Kids are the top priority at the Cape Fear Valley Medical Center Children’s Emergency Department. Top | Even the waiting room is child-friendly. Above | Animal prints lead the way to treatment rooms. 42 | June/July • 2010 medicine physician and medical director of the children’s ED. Instead of 17 beds, he said, Cumberland County’s growth could have easily accommodated an even larger unit. Now, the hospital is talking about the ED’s future again. Cape Fear keeps growing, here and in Hoke County. It recently opened Hoke County’s only urgent care clinic and broke ground near the front of the hospital for a new facility that will house the CyberKnife, a piece of equipment used to treat cancers that cannot be surgically removed or treated with traditional radiation. But on the other side of the hospital, at the children’s emergency department, kids come first, and that priority is reflected in everything from the decor to the specially-trained staff. It begins with a separate entrance and waiting area. Having a separate entrance from the main emergency room, one of the busiest in the state, is important. It shields children from the traumas they might otherwise see in the main ED. Instead, families come in beside a bubbling koi pond, a nice distraction from the mission at hand, and can wait

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