PBMC looks to establish designated trauma center for the East End

PBMC Health is looking establish the East End’s only designated trauma center, PBMC Health president and CEO Andrew Mitchell told the Riverhead Planning Board this afternoon.

“The East End badly needs a trauma center and Riverhead is the obvious location,” he said.

The medical center renovated and expanded its emergency department several years ago and the area now reserved for “prompt care” — the less serious cases arriving at the emergency department — would be dedicated to trauma cases, Mitchell said.

Prompt care cases, along with the patients who go to the emergency room for non-emergent care, would be diverted to the hospital annex that PBMC plans to build on Route 58 just west of Kroemer Avenue.

The annex facility has been before the planning board, which today approved the plan in a 4-1 vote, with member Stan Carey dissenting.

The annex will be built in a free-standing pad in the parking lot in front of Bob’s Discount Furniture. The developer is purchasing agricultural development rights to acquire the right to add density to the already-built site.

Carey voiced objections to adding density to the site, which he said he thought was already “very poorly designed.” He also expressed concern about traffic impacts on the crowded county roadway.

Mitchell said he did not disagree that the location was not the best, but said it is the best the hospital can do. “We don’t have a lot of options,” he said.

“We’d rather have this facility on our present campus, but we don’t have room and we don’t have the resources to build it anywhere we’d like,” Mitchell said. “When a developer or a philanthropist comes forward and offers you an opportunity, you have to explore it,” he said.

“We’re trying to do the right thing,” Mitchell said. “We’re trying to keep health care moving as the community grows.”

Mitchell said PBMC is just starting the process to gain approval for the level-three trauma center. If approved by the state health department and the American College of Surgeons, it would eliminate the need for many — though not all — trauma patients to be transported to Stony Brook University Hospital. Stony Brook is a level-one trauma center and would still be the place to which the most serious trauma cases are transported, he said.

An East End trauma center would benefit area ambulance corps, which currently have to take one or two ambulances and their crews far out of their district for a couple of hours when a patient has to be transported to Stony Brook, Mitchell said.

PBMC is hoping to line up all approvals and begin construction by late spring.