Beaufort County Emergency Room | Eastern NC Now

Beaufort County Emergency Room

BY: HOOD RICHARDSON

Commissioner Jerry Langley, a member of the neutered Beaufort County Hospital Board, gave a report at our September meeting on wait times at the emergency room. There have been complaints about poor service involving long wait times. His report followed the classical line of excuses. Too many people use the emergency room for free medical service that should be provided by primary care physicians. Too many people do not have a primary care physician. Too many people do not have insurance, so they use the emergency room.

The other side of this situation is that emergency rooms need better management. They can use triage to their advantage by screening out non-emergencies, providing first aid and sending patients home right away with instructions to see their primary care physician. One argument against this is: What if we mistakenly send someone home who is or becomes a true emergency? The answer to this is that we need the legislature to do tort reform. Eliminating certificates of need will allow new vendors to provide emergency services.

There have been payments to hospitals from the federal government for handling a disproportionate share of poverty cases. This was a part of Obama Care. I predict that, if these payments are cut by the Trump Administration, we will see emergency rooms managed differently. This kind of medical reform is supposed to be in the “Big Beautiful Bill”.

The hospital in Belhaven handled 5,000 emergency visits each year. It was Jerry Langley, Ed Booth and Frankie Waters who voted, on several occasions, to not support that hospital and to close the hospital and emergency room. There is no doubt that two emergency rooms are better than one. Now those people come to Washington. This was done to accommodate the people who now run the Beaufort Hospital, so they could have a monopoly and keep their emergency room busy.

According to Langley the load on the Beaufort Hospital is expected to become less when the hospital in Martin County is reopened. How much less is hard to tell because the Greenville emergency room is as close as the Washington emergency room in a lot of Martin County.