The Trenton Times published the following article on December 17, 2013. To read the full article, click here.
Capital Health to close emergency room at old Mercer Hospital in Trenton
By Jenna Pizzi/The Times of Trenton
on December 17, 2013 at 6:40 AM, updated December 17, 2013 at 6:41 AMTRENTON — Capital Health will officially close its satellite emergency room at the old Mercer Hospital today at 11 p.m., following a sharp decline in patient traffic since the main hospital operations were discontinued in late 2011.
The emergency room is all that remains of the hospital group’s former Bellevue Avenue site, and was maintained for the past two years, after general operations were moved to a newly constructed medical center in Hopewell Township and across town to the Capital Health Regional Medical Center on Brunswick Avenue.
Over the past few years efforts have been made to beef up primary care services for city residents so they depend less on emergency room visits, and at the time the closure was announced last month Capital Health officials said they were seeing as few as 12 patients a day at the emergency center, many of them not in need of emergency care at all. By contrast, the patient traffic has been higher by about 200 people previously.