BELLEVILLE

Belleville OKs Clara Maass emergency room expansion

Mollie Shauger
NorthJersey
A rendering of the proposed Emergency Department renovations at Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville.

The Belleville Zoning Board of Adjustment has given its go-ahead for Clara Maass Medical Center to expand its Emergency Services department.

As previously reported, the hospital was seeking approval for a 1,400-square-foot addition and renovations to its Emergency Department and an 8,000-square-foot courtyard between the ER and a recently built Intensive Care Unit. The application included four variances.

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Domenic Segalla, the chief operating officer and chief financial officer of Clara Maass, appeared before the board on Thursday, July 6, to explain the reasons for the upgrades. Segalla said Clara Maass is looking to expand the current Emergency Room by adding more space and to segregate pediatrics and behavioral health treatment areas. Right now, the two areas are commingled, he said.

"Our whole goal is to create and help to expand and create a need that is here for the community, and how do we serve that need. We feel very strongly that right now we don't have the capacity to provide this need for the community," Segalla said.

"We've spend a lot of time over the last six months trying to become as efficient as we can, and even though we've made a lot of progress, it's still a small setting for the volume we continue to see," he added.

The hospital sees about 20,000 pediatric visits a year, and about 10,000 behavioral health visits, he said.

As a result of the the Affordable Care Act, more patients are being treated in an outpatient setting, he noted, and some with behavioral health issues don't necessarily need to be admitted to the hospital.

Clara Maass intends to add more observation beds for these patients to be treated and cared for in a safer and more efficient way, but not necessarily admitted to the hospital, he explained.

Also, these treatment areas have special requirements in that they cannot contain furnishings and other items that a patient could potentially use for committing suicide, he said.

A map shows where the additional construction would occur at Clara Maass.

The expansion would also include the addition of 10 pediatric treatment rooms on top of 13, for patients to be examined, he said. 

The Zoning Board became hung up on the aspect of parking, as the hospital had proposed eliminating a small number of spaces to enhance the drop-off area to the Emergency Department.

Board Chair A.J. Del Guercio and Vice Chair William Villano expressed concern that patients in distress or those who have physical ailments may not be able to walk from another lot 250 feet away from the ER.

The application had proposed a loss of 16 parking spaces overall. However the applicants agreed to provide four additional parking spots at the drop-off area, and to reserve seven in a nearby employee lot for Emergency Room visitors, and not to refuse other ER visitors from parking in the lot.

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