Patients at Estes Park Health will soon have a new touch screen system to let their nurse know if they need a drink, assistance getting out of bed, or more pain medication instead of just pushing a button on a cord.
The Estes Park Health Board authorized the expenditure of $800,000 for the nursing call system during the EPH monthly meeting Wednesday evening.
The upgrade was included in the 2025 budget, but the actual expenditure had to be approved by the board because of the high ticket price. A service agreement no longer covers the current call button system, so when something goes wrong with it, “we have to be really creative,” said Pat Samples, director of nursing.
As discussed by the board, the new system will be used throughout the hospital. In addition to providing more efficiency in patient care, the system is currently in use by UCHealth, with whom EPH hopes to affiliate by mid-summer.
“This gives the patient a little more control to communicate with us,” Samples said.
The new system should be operational in June.
In other business, David Batey, president of the EPH board of directors, said it is possible that the board could resume meeting in person in April.
“We went to online meetings because we had expressions of threats toward board members,” Batey said. Because of those threats, he said the board decided to move the meetings to an online format for the safety of anyone attending the meetings.
“We continue to assess whether those threats continue to be expressed toward people, and if we make the assessment that it’s now safe to go back to in-person meetings, then we’ll do that, but we’re not going to go back to in-person meetings if we have a sense that for us, and for public members attending, that there is an unacceptable risk involved with that.”
In January, the board announced that a potential threat was reported to law enforcement, and out of an abundance of caution to ensure the safety of the public and Estes Park Health employees and leadership who attend the meeting, officials decided the meeting would only be held virtually.
Also discussed at the meeting were broad details about the potential operational affiliation with UCHealth.
According to Vern Carda, EPH CEO, information now being exchanged provides the basis for other legal documents, “including a lease and then an operational agreement, so those are resting in the, I’d say, more final stages of development,” he said.”
“There are still four or five fairly significant issues to address prior to those documents being ready for signature. So, we’re working on legal documents and lease document,” Carda reported.