CPR FOR AN ER EMERGENCY ROOM GETS BIG ADDITION.

Byline: ALEX DOBUZINSKIS Staff Writer

NEWHALL -- The emergency room at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital might be known as crowded and cramped, but hospital officials expect that to change when an addition opens around Thanksgiving.

The hospital raised $14.4 million in private funding for the project. On Wednesday, donors and other supporters got a chance to see the gleaming walls and the new equipment of the addition.

Carol Meyers, director of emergency services for the county Health Services Department, told the crowd of 125 people that it's important for a community to support a local hospital with an emergency room. One in every three people in the county will visit an emergency room in the next year, she said.

``Look to the left of you; look to the right: One of you will go to an emergency room in the next 12 months, and you want to be sure that a quality emergency room like this one is there for you,'' she said.

After its licensing paperwork goes through, the addition will open around Thanksgiving with 18 beds. And the current emergency room will be renovated, as part of the $14.4 million expansion project, to bring the total number of ER beds at the hospital to 36.

Seating for Wednesday's ceremony was in parking stalls facing the doors of the new addition. After the ceremony, the doors swung open, and the audience was led inside.

The addition has bays with sliding-glass doors where trauma patients can be operated on. Vital signs are monitored with touch-screen instruments including built-in electrocardiograph systems. Digital clocks on the walls show the seconds passing, and all are synchronized to help the medical staff know precisely when patients are seen and given medicines.

Roger Seaver, president and chief executive at the hospital, said the project will dramatically improve the emergency room.

Conditions can be tough for patients who drive to the current 21-bed emergency room, especially at night, he said.

``You'd be brought in to triage, and unless you had something life-threatening, you'd be sitting in the emergency room waiting room for some time -- if there's a seat,'' Seaver said. Even beyond the waiting room, patients are crowded together in seats and beds, he noted.

In the past year, the hospital served 41,000 patients at its ER, built to serve only 18,000 a year.

The late Tom Veloz, a local businessman and philanthropist, donated $1 million to jump-start $14.4 million in fundraising.

His former wife, Roberta Veloz, donated $3 million last year to cap off the effort.

There were more than 500 donors. The Weingart Foundation gave $750,000. The Ahmanson Foundation, Joe and Priscilla Caso, the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation and the UniHealth Foundation each gave $500,000. Hospital employees pledged $350,000. Physicians pledged $700,000 more.

``You folks have come forward,'' said Joe Lindamen, a battalion chief with the county Fire Department, ``and you have made a big difference in the lives of this community.''

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(color) Donors get a preview Wednesday of the gleaming emergency-room addition at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital.

David Crane/Staff Photographer