Consultants have been in Baton Rouge in recent weeks meeting with community leaders as they evaluate options for the Mid City campus of Baton Rouge General Hospital, which closed its emergency room earlier this year.
Hospital officials say it will likely be the end of the year before they get a final recommendation on what to do with the Florida Street facility, which remains open but has seen its average daily census decline to about 78 since shuttering the emergency room in March.
Hospital officials previously have said among the likely options for the facility are a post-acute care or rehab hospital, or perhaps a mental health care facility. Those possibilities remain on the table.
“At this point, we’re still in the early phases of planning—reviewing industry trends and projections for the future, analyzing community needs, and evaluating patient demand, which has declined since the closure of the Mid City ER, as we expected,” says hospital spokesperson Meghan Parrish. “We’re working closely with our advisers and they are checking in regularly with the administration on their progress. Each path we go down creates a number of new factors to consider and impacts the community, our staff and our patients in different ways.”
General Health Systems, which owns Baton Rouge General Hospital’s facilities in Mid City and on Bluebonnet Boulevard, has said it wants to keep the hospital open in some sort of capacity.
—Stephanie Riegel
