More on the Mission/St. Joe’s emergency room closure

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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These comments from loyal Ashvegas readers add more information to the original Twitter report I saw, then blogged, that the St. Joseph’s emergency room is set to be closed later this year:

This has been known for a while. Dr Sig, the in house “ask the expert” column in the staff paper has talked about it. There has been e-mails about it between the staff affected. The ER at Mission is expanding and they will close the St Joe’s ER once this happens. From what some have heard, the ER admit unit will take over the rooms that the Neuro-trauma ICU was using since that Dept has moved over into the new Dogwood building that opened recently. This will give more rooms to the main ER and the staff from both sides of the road will be combined at Mission to hopefully allow it to run smoother and faster. You can probably go back and look through the old “Scope” newsletters to find letters about the moves. The scope archives are under the staff log-in link on the Mission Hospital web site. You don’t have to be staff or have a log-in to get these. The only thing is you can’t search them. This all has been in the works since before the econ tanked, so that really doesn’t play much into this.

They are “consolidating,” not “closing,” per say. The staff that currently work in the St. Joe’s ED will go to the Mission campus. They’re doing a lot of remodeling at the Mission ED to expand a little and get ready for this. Originally, the merge was supposed to occur in June/July, but I also have heard the date is now the first of October.