Door County Memorial’s New Standard

When it came time for Door County Memorial Hospital to transition to its present location in 1963, the hospital staff worked, unpaid, on a long Saturday to make the move. They packed up patients, laid their meds and charts on top of them in a plastic bag, then rolled them into moving vans and hearses (which still served as the ambulances at the time) for the ride from the old hospital on Jefferson Street (now the Dorchester) to the new facility on 18th Avenue in Sturgeon Bay.

It will be a far different experience when today’s staff and patients move into the new $20.5 million Emergency Department in mid-August. This move will be done as part of a mock evacuation, with the fire and police departments taking part, a host of regulations to follow, and a mock disaster scripted down to 15-minute intervals.

The new Emergency Department gives nurses line of sight to every room and features eight private patient rooms.

The new 31,080 square-foot, two-story wing they’ll move patients into is the largest construction project the hospital has ever undertaken. It includes 28 private rooms for medical/ surgical, intensive care, as well as birthing and women’s inpatient health. But it’s the advancements in the emergency department that paint the most stunning picture of how far medicine has come since the hospital’s move 47 years ago.

When nine nurses who helped with that move gathered for a reunion at Stone Harbor Resort July 19, they told a story of a different era in medicine and patient expectations.

“The emergency care service today is just wonderful compared to back then,” gushed Judy Berg. “A lot of lives that wouldn’t have been saved back then are saved today.”

Berg began her career, as did the rest of the nurses, before the hospital employed dedicated ER staff. The Jefferson Street hospital could handle two ER patients at a time. When an ER patient arrived, nurses would simply be pulled off their regular rounds, and a doctor would be called in from home. Often, nobody at the hospital even knew a patient was coming in until the hearse pulled up to the doors.

Today, there’s a doctor on premises all the time with staff assigned to the ER.

Mary Onsager remembered the days when a doctor would show up at the hospital, “a cigarette hanging from his mouth” to make the rounds with her. And, he wasn’t the only one lighting up. Patients would smoke in their beds, including one who dropped their cigarette and burned his own catheter.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were a pre-disposable time, and gloves and needles were often washed and re-used. Though they seem astonished by their own memories of those practices, the nurses said they don’t remember a lot of infections, guessing that people had stronger immune systems at the time.

June Peterson uses the then-modern sterilizing machine at the new hospital in 1964.

The new wing that will be dedicated Aug. 6 is a revolution for the hospital, with private rooms, advanced computer and care technology, and amenities for staff in the rooms. But when the “old” hospital was dedicated on October 3, 1964, a revolution in care meant something much simpler for Carol Newman.

“I didn’t have to carry the bed-pan all the way down the hall with a lid on it,” she said laughing. “You could dump it right in the room.”

They had few or no in-room supplies at the old Dorchester location, where patients packed in four to a room, and five if the hospital was pressed for space in the summertime. Rooms had a bedside table, a basic chair for a guest, and a hand crank at the end of the bed to adjust it for comfort. There was no oxygen in the room, so nurses would have to run for a tank and wheel it in when needed. The setup resulted in staff spending a lot of time running for supplies instead of being with the patient.

The nursing staff had limited pull in those days. Newman started her career in 1961, making $1.40 an hour. “I think the window-washers were making more,” she remembered, not joking. Judy Fisher started at $1.25 and hour, and they remembered being envious of the wages of the check-out ladies at the old Red Owl grocery store.

But they didn’t become nurses to get rich. “It was about being aware of people other than yourselves,” said Dorothy Gerl.

“You had really dedicated nurses in those days,” Newman said. “You could spend more time with patients because you didn’t have as much paperwork. You didn’t do it for the money, you did it because you loved it.”

Unfortunately, the nurses said they were given no say-so on the design of the new hospital in 1963.

“That was done without any input from the nurses, that’s for sure,” Newman said, and the rest nod in affirmation.

After the luncheon at Stone Harbor, the nurses are led on a tour of the new Emergency Department by Jody Boes, Vice President of Patient Care Services for Door County Memorial Hospital. She assured them that nurses were integral in the design this time around.

“The project team created outside walls, while the care staff was instrumental in designing what’s inside the walls,” Boes said. “Back then it was the standard to just have architects come in and design a facility. But over time we’ve realized that the people doing the work need a say-so in the design of the workplace.”

Jody Boes, vice president of patient care services for Door County Memorial Hospital, shows the hospital’s new wing to nine nurses who were on staff when the hospital opened in 1964.

Boes said the new rooms were created to give the nurses everything they could right in the room, allowing for more face-to-face time between patients and nurses.

The hospital hopes the new facilities help it to maintain and grow its market share in an increasingly competitive region. In addition to retaining current patients, the hospital hopes to attract patients who might otherwise go to Green Bay for services.

The expansion was made necessary by an evolution in thinking about what helps patients heal. Though Boes said the hospital has been ahead of the game in terms of technology, “our environment has not quite been there. This is all about privacy and confidentiality. We have space dedicated to the patient and the family, and this really puts the patient in the center of everything we do.”

She recounted an anecdote told to her to illustrate the importance of patient comfort and privacy.

“When you go on a vacation, you don’t go to the Hilton or the Marriott and say, ‘I’m on vacation. Do you have someone I can share a room with?’” Boes asked. “Why do we expect people to do so in their most vulnerable hour?”