The long-awaited new hospital in Prince George’s County has seen a surge of emergency department patients since it opened last month — a wave that officials say highlights a need for medical care that has long existed in the Maryland suburb.
When University of Maryland Capital Region Medical Center opened its doors June 12, leaders said their goal was to lure back some of the estimated 50 percent of residents who had been leaving the county for care. The demand, so far, has more than exceeded expectations, officials said, with about 30 percent more patients seeking care at the Largo hospital’s emergency room compared with the now-shuttered Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly.
But that increase has come with challenges, said the new hospital’s chief executive, Nathaniel Richardson Jr. — including long wait times in the emergency room that have led to frustration among patients. The surge is not at this point driven by covid-19 cases, he said, but instead by people who delayed regular medical care during the pandemic and by an increase in trauma cases, including injuries from car accidents now that restrictions have lifted and more cars are on the road.
Robb Hill for The Washington Post
The University of Maryland Capital Region Medical Center in Largo.
Between July 5 and July 20, the average wait time between arriving in the emergency room and being seen by a provider was about two hours and 10 minutes; the average wait time between arriving and being admitted to the hospital or being discharged was five hours and 40 minutes.
Prince George’s County Council member Derrick Leon Davis (D-District 6), who has long been a strong backer of the new hospital, said he has seen complaints from constituents on social media about wait times at the hospital. Davis said these early reports have reinforced his belief that the hospital should have had a bigger footprint.
After years of debate in which Davis and other Democrats from Prince George’s pushed the administration of Gov. Larry Hogan (R) for state funding and approval for a bigger hospital, they agreed to a 205-bed facility — which was about 30 beds smaller than Cheverly.
“The hospital should’ve been bigger,” Davis said Monday. “It has already been proven . . . size matters, and we need more.”
Richardson said the demand clearly shows the strong desire of Prince Georgians to be treated in the county where they live — which has a fraction of the hospital beds, per capita, as neighboring jurisdictions.
Prince George’s, which is more than 80 percent Black and Latino, was hit hardest in the region by covid-19 in terms of per capita case and death rates. It has about half as many hospital beds per capita as Montgomery County, and less than one-fourth as many as the District.
“The community has certainly said, ‘Look, we are here, and we want our hospital here,’ ” Richardson said. “ ‘We don’t want to have to go outside of the county to receive our care.’ ”
Neil J. Sehgal, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, said that boarding time — the time it takes for a patient to be transferred from the emergency department to an inpatient bed — can have an impact on quality of care, so it is important to keep it as low as possible.
He said the layers of lack of access to medical care that exist in Prince George’s, where there are also fewer primary care doctors per capita compared with neighboring jurisdictions, has likely contributed to the surge of patients that Capital Region is seeing.
“Many people with chronic conditions delayed getting care because of fear during the pandemic,” he said. “Now they are seeking it more acutely.”
[The pandemic rocked this small hospital in a mostly Black suburb. Now it’s trying to grow.]
Some uptick in patient volume is expected whenever a new hospital opens. Richardson said that when he opened hospitals in Texas and Alabama, for example, he saw patient volumes increase by 8 and 11 percent, respectively. He said he was expecting about a 15 percent increase at Capital Region, which is near the Largo Town Center Metro station.
The new facility is a 620,000-square-foot, glass-paneled building with private rooms, unlike the doubles at the 75-year-old facility in Cheverly.
The new hospital, which is part of the University of Maryland Medical System’s network of 13 hospitals, has an emergency department that is slightly bigger than Cheverly’s with 41 beds.
Robb Hill for The Washington Post
Joseph Wright, chief medical officer at Capital Region, gives a tour of the new facility in June.
Richardson said that 17 beds are being added to the emergency department, in addition to 43 registered nurses being hired to meet the increased demand. All the nurses will be hired by Aug. 2. The hospital has already hired an additional emergency department physician to accommodate the volume.
At this point, Richardson said he is not concerned about increasing the overall size of the hospital. Instead, he said, he is hopeful that new beds and increased staffing will make the emergency department operate more efficiently.
“The emergency department,” he said, “is not a department that anyone wants to wait for.”
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