Salem Hospital will be among the beneficiaries of the North Shore Medical Center’s Emergency Services Project.

Five North Shore community banks each have contributed to a project that will revitalize the North Shore Medical Center’s hospitals by helping them provide improved service and better care.

Lynn-based Eastern Bank, Danvers Savings Bank, the National Grand Bank of Marblehead, Peabody-based North Shore Bank and Salem Five Cents Savings Bank have contributed $160,000 to the medical center’s Emergency Services Project.

The project’s goal is to raise $3 million to equip two emergency rooms, one at the Salem Hospital and one at the Union Hospital in Lynn. The North Shore Medical Center is investing $5 million itself in the project. So far, $1.99 million of the $3 million has been raised.

The Eastern Bank Charitable Foundation made the largest contribution in the organization’s history, a gift of $100,000, to the project. Stanley Lukowski, chairman and chief executive officer of Eastern, said the decision to make the gift stems from a long history with the hospital.

“The North Shore Medical Center has been such an important part of both the Lynn and Salem communities, and they serve a broader base than that. That’s really our home market. We’ve been actively involved with that organization over the years and understand the need, and figured this was the right thing to do,” said Lukowski.

“They were really dramatically outdated. The North Shore Medical Center has great staff and great doctors and nurses, but the facility they have to work in – if you walked in there as an emergency room patient, it just wouldn’t be a pleasant environment to be treated in,” he added.

James Kraus, president of the North Shore Medical Center Foundation and vice president of the medical center, agreed. The Salem Hospital dates back to 1916 and the Union Hospital to 1953, he said.

“The pressure put on those facilities to handle not only the increased population that has occurred naturally on the North Shore [is difficult], and also the fact that we’ve seen so many closures in hospitals and, in particular, emergency rooms since 1953,” said Kraus.

“All those patients feed into the Union and Salem hospital facility in the service areas we cover, so there’s a lot of pressure, a lot of demand. The scope of what we have now just can’t keep up. It’s frustrating to the patients. It’s extremely frustrating to the staff to be able to handle patients,” said Kraus.

Not having modern facilities also presents another problem, recruitment. It is difficult to convince doctors and nurses to work in outdated facilities when there are other hospitals with state-of-the-art equipment, said Kraus.

New Procedure
Scheduled to be completed by December, the project will add an express care unit to both hospitals, the North Shore Children’s Hospital (which is part of Salem Hospital) emergency room will be redesigned, facilities to increase patient privacy at hospital emergency rooms will be added and cutting edge technology will be installed.

In the emergency department, the traditional route was to treat everyone that came in the best manner possible and sent them on their way, said Kraus.

“Well, the new procedure at both sites is to triage patients immediately as they arrive on your doorstep. Essentially you have your sprains and sore throats and high fevers – they go in one direction. Then you have your trauma cases and they go in another direction – your broken bones, automobile accidents – people who have been conveyed to you that are in need of serious help. Then we have a pediatric side. Those young kids get handled in a very different mode,” said Kraus. The new facility also will feature a dedicated separate treatment area and waiting room for mental health and drug dependency patients.

According to September 2000 figures, supplied by the hospitals, Salem Hospital had 38,361 visits; Union Hospital had 29,279 visits; and the North Shore Children’s Hospital had 13,872 visits.

In addition to updating the facilities, a telemedicine unit will be added to the hospital, enabling staff to enlist the world-class services of doctors from top Boston hospitals on difficult cases.

“You get the expert opinion downtown looking in on the cases that are actually in Salem or Union Hospital,” said Kraus.

While Klaus said he is pleased with the contributions by area banks, he is not surprised because of the history community banks have of donating time and money to the hospitals.

The center finally came to the decision that a large project was needed last year, said Kraus.

“Both of these sites have been looked at over the years, and we’ve been patching systems to make them work,” he said. “We’ve come to the realization in the last year that the patch won’t work any further … The Band-Aid approach was costing us good physicians and good staff who were looking elsewhere to earn a living because of the nature of the facilities we had.

“Unfortunately, the economy started to slump at the same time. But for the purposes of philanthropy, people continue to recognize the need and have stepped up big-time to assist us with this project.”