Ambulatory Services

William Bee Ririe Hospital is located on Ely in the county of White Pine, Nevada. The hospital has total bed capacity of 25. It has 10 physicians and more than 100 support staff including nurses, dieticians, respiratory therapist, and subordinate staff. The hospital’s services are rich and broad, they include diagnostic radiology, anatomical laboratory, blood blank, anesthesia, clinical laboratory, dental, dietary, ICU cardiac (non-Surgical), ICU medical/surgical inpatient surgical, neonatal nursery, and emergency among others (William Bee Ririe Hospital, 2011). The hospital operates by the county, and serves a medium sized population. It runs on non-profit basis with most of the acquired profits reinvested in the expansion and improvement of the hospital’s services.
Being a non-for-profit facility, the hospital faces a primary challenge of raising adequate capital needed for improving infrastructure, running, and maintaining technological advancement that is required in the provision of the healthcare services. The investment channels for the facility are tied since it cannot accept the private investments or sell shares to the public. There is a massive burden of bearing the cost of improving the healthcare quality level provided to the individual patients and access to care for the old aged, poor, and uninsured. The hospital has a long-term plan for attaining a high level of prevention and treatment, which is not resource intensive; this is in a line with the objective of non-profitability. Prevention and control would ensure the patients do not require the advanced treatment procedure that could be expensive.
The facility has recently undergone the expansion renovations to bring the state of the art equipments to the community (William Bee Ririe Hospital, 2011). The facility I chose is the 24 emergency services, which has a minor emergency operation room incorporated in the expansion scheme of the operating suite. The hospital emergency services require the ambulatory care services, which is a component of the emergency care. Both the community and the facility needed this renovation and expansion to give room for the installation of a modern, more efficient, and cost effective equipment including a modernized ambulatory response centre. The community could not access emergency services that came with the expansion, at a cost friendly rate. In the past, the community had to seek the same services from a distantly located hospital, and at extremely expensive treatment costs (Carson, 2012). As mentioned earlier, the hospital runs on a not-for-profit module; this means that these same services would not be affordable to the poor. The geographical terrain of the region requires highly sophisticated equipment in the area of emergency response in order to meet the patient’s needs. An increase in the patient base also necessitated the expansion; the previous capacity was two patients at a time, after the expansion the facility would be able to hold 10 patients at a go. The objective of the emergency care is to save a threatened life through the provision of the urgent healthcare services. The achievement of this objective has been significant, but the new equipments and the improved ambulatory services would accelerate the level of this achievement.
The 2011 census estimates the population of Ely region to be about 4,041 people. The chief economic activity of the region is mining which employs 80 percent of the working population. Occupation is a significant determinant of the health hazards expected; with this occupation, efficient emergency services are vital in dealing with the work related injuries (Carson, 2012). About 13 percent of the total population is made up of persons above the age of 65 years; these people are living either alone or in the families. This is critical in determining healthcare services suitable for the elderly. The population density of the region stands at 309 per square mile (119.4/Km2). The majority of the residents are Whites occupying 89 percent of a total population. The young population (less than 18 years of Age) makes up 25 percent of the city population in this region.