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WENTZVILLE — SSM Health has doubled the capacity of its emergency room in Wentzville, a move to improve safety and ramp up medical services in a growing county.
The project at SSM Health St. Joseph Hospital in Wentzville gives ER staff separate areas to care for behavioral health and general medical patients, said hospital President Jake Brooks. And it gives the hospital a much-needed boost in capacity in one of the fastest-growing parts of the state.
“Anytime there’s population growth, there has to be infrastructure there to support it,” said Brooks, who is also president of SSM Health St. Joseph Hospital in St. Charles. “You need education, you need health care, you need public services.”
St. Charles County added almost 2,900 residents last year, and has been growing steadily for decades. SSM bought the hospital in 2006.
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SSM St. Joseph in Wentzville cares for a large portion of behavioral health patients. While the facility has outpatient services like imaging, primary care and family medicine, its 77 inpatient beds are all dedicated to behavioral health.
Brooks said the emergency department cares for general medical patients and behavioral health patients, and historically the unit’s seven beds were used for both.
Over the past six months, the hospital upgraded a nearby unit and connected it to the emergency department. The ER will now operate with 14 beds — half for patients with general, medical needs and half for behavioral health patients.
“If a medical patient comes in, they are separated from somebody who might be having an acute behavioral health episode, which creates a better experience for both of them,” Brooks said.
Safety has been a top concern for ER workers across the St. Louis region over the past few years. Especially during the height of the pandemic patients were often scared and distressed, and in short-staffed units with longer wait times health care workers were left caring for increasingly frustrated patients and families.
SSM isn’t the only major health system pursuing the region’s westward population growth. Just last month Mercy requested state approval to build a new, $650 million, 75-bed hospital in Wentzville. Officials said at the time that they had been eyeing expansion in the tri-county area — St. Charles, Lincoln and Warren Counties — since 2010, and expected that demand there would only continue to grow.
SSM has four outpatient centers in that market, Brooks said, and will soon have five urgent cares there. The health system has been building a new, 66,000-square-foot outpatient center in O’Fallon, expected to open in October. It will have adult and pediatric primary and specialty care, an urgent care, a lab, a retail pharmacy and an imaging center.
“St. Charles County is growing,” Brooks said. “We’re growing with it.”
View life in St. Louis through the Post-Dispatch photographers’ lenses. Edited by Jenna Jones.
