As of April this year, all Emergency Department providers at Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital are board-certified, geriatric emergency medicine residency-trained physicians who are also authorized to provide care at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center’s Emergency Department.
This development has been in the works since September 2019, when Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health partnered with California-based nonprofit West Health on a $4.5 million collaboration to establish DHMC as a center for geriatric emergency care. The agreement also included a provision to provide telehealth services and geriatric emergency department training to four local rural hospitals, including APD.
Now, having transitioned its ED staffing and hospitalist services to this new regional model, APD is able to “manage more acute cases in our small and intimate setting that affords short wait times for care and brings an added level of confidence and familiarity to the community we serve,” APD Chief Medical Officer Dr. Michael Lynch said. Read more about the work to bring these specialized services to seniors in rural communities HERE.
The DHH-West Health collaboration also helped facilitate APD’s recent accomplishment: the hospital’s Emergency Services team has earned national accreditation as a Level 2 GED (Geriatric Emergency Department) from the American College of Emergency Physicians, in a process designed to improve and standardize emergency care for older patients. Read the full press release on accreditation HERE.
