Rush-Copley proposes emergency center
Yorkville facility: Would be built at new health complex

March 13, 2008
By Rowena Vergara Staff Writer

YORKVILLE -- When the village of Bolingbrook welcomed the state's first-ever freestanding emergency center in 2000, a full-blown hospital called Adventist Bolingbrook Hospital opened eight years later. It remains to be seen whether the city of Yorkville could follow in the community's footsteps.

Rush-Copley Medical Center filed a letter of intent for a freestanding emergency center at 1100 W. Veterans Parkway, to be built on the future Rush-Copley Healthcare Center opening by June at Route 34 and Beecher Road in Yorkville.

The proposed emergency center -- open 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- would not contain any beds, but it would provide more complex care than an urgent-care center, a facility some health professionals have compared to a doctor's office setting.

Hospitals see such centers as a chance to ease emergency room crowding. The emergency center treated patients for "basic life support" conditions, which included broken arms or legs, among other problems. Details about the potential Yorkville emergency center are still in initial stages.

Rush-Copley estimates the center would cost $8 million and would occupy 6,800 square feet. A Certificate of Need permit would be needed for the project. Rush-Copley may submit an application as early as this month, according to the letter of intent filed late last year. Rush-Copley also has filed a letter of intent for a surgical facility that would be called Yorkville Surgery Center, also on the health care campus. The 5,000-square-foot surgical center could cost $7.5 million.

Nancy Wilson, vice president of ancillary services for Rush-Copley, said the emergency center and surgical center would operate independently of each other, in that patients won't undergo surgery at surgical center after being seen at the emergency facility.

Rush-Copley officials have said that until there is a need for a hospital in terms of population, the health system wouldn't plan to open a hospital in Yorkville anytime soon. Then again, Adventist Bolingbrook Hospital officials once felt the same way, explained Elizabeth Lively, associate vice president with Adventist Midwest Health. "We kept adding services, so the natural progression was after outpatient center it would be to get ambulances, then establish a freestanding emergency center and then hospital because of population growth," she said.

Rush-Copley is in the process of building a $23 million health-care center at Route 34 and Beecher Road which will include Kendall County's first walk-in clinic, as well as physician offices and diagnostic services.

rvergara@scn1.com