Perched on the fourth floor of Bridgeport Hospital, two wings come together in the shape of an L. They house the Connecticut Burn Center ”“ the state”™s only dedicated burn care facility.
While one wing was renovated in the 1990s, the other was likely original to the building, said John Schulz, medical director of the burn center.
“It was so original,” Schulz said, “that when Al Pacino and Robert De Niro were making a 1950s film (“Righteous Kill”) a few years back, they chose this unit to film a hospital scene.”
But now that has all changed, thanks to a group of firefighters and hospital staff.
The Stratford Professional Firefighters Burn Foundation and other groups of Connecticut firefighters are credited with spearheading the effort that led to a yearlong, $1.5 million renovation of the burn center.
The project, which began in the fall of 2011 and ran through September 2012, featured the additions of an overnight suite for families of patients, a conference room, a rehabilitation room, a treatment room with a medical shower table and a dedicated elevator connecting the center directly to the main operating room suite, as well as upgrades to each of the patient rooms.
Jackie Laird, the burn center”™s nurse manager, said it was only fitting that firefighters provided the impetus for the eventual renovation project.
Firefighting gear has improved a great deal, but burns and other injuries still occur, Laird said.
If a firefighter is hospitalized, “You look in the waiting room and their whole crew is going to be waiting,” Laird said.
Schulz said, “For several years we had been talking about a renovation and at the same time, the firefighters were talking about a place for a patient”™s family to be. What they wanted to do became wrapped up in the idea of renovating the burn unit.”
With the center being the closest burn treatment facility for most residents and fire departments in the state, “This is what the state of Connecticut has and this is the place where people are going to come,” Laird said.
By the time the burn center was dedicated in December, Connecticut firefighters had raised more than $126,000 to support the project.
At the center, physicians and nurses treat from 250 to 300 patients a year, of which 20 percent to 25 percent are children, Laird said. Another 800 burn patients receive care each year at the hospital”™s outpatient facility, which is across the street from the main hospital building.
The burn center has nine rooms, five of which are intensive-care unit (ICU) capable, Schulz said.
Prior to the renovation some rooms had as many as four beds and many of the old wing”™s windows were poorly sealed and were equipped with window-mounted air conditioning units. Now, all but one of the rooms has just one bed and each room has a private bathroom. All of the patient rooms have state-of-the-art monitoring technology and all are equipped with new lighting for in-room treatment.
“We need to be able to deliver the best burn care,” Schulz said. “Bad burn injuries are very, very resource intensive.”
The hospital is often treating more than nine burn patients at once, with some patient stays lasting several months or more, Schulz said. He said children are generally treated in the hospital”™s pediatric unit and any other overflow patients are treated in the surgical ICU, but noted that all patients ”“ regardless of where in the hospital they are being treated ”“ will be cared for by burn center physicians and nurses.
To help deal with any overflows, Bridgeport Hospital and other hospitals in the region with burn treatment facilities are in constant contact, Schulz said.
After the Boston Marathon bombing in April, “We got phone calls asking, ”˜How many could you take?”™” Schulz said, although Bridgeport Hospital did not end up receiving any of the injured.
“The number of patients you can handle with bad burns is limited, so we have transfer agreements,” he said. “A hospital can quickly be totally overwhelmed. That”™s why, since 9/11, there”™s been a lot of thought in the trauma and burn communities around how we handle incidents of a larger scale.”
