The door to the emergency room at the Ellwood City Medical Center is locked.
A sign states that the hospital is temporarily closed “until further notice. Please proceed to the next closest hospitals.” Those facilities, located in the towns of New Castle, Butler and New Brighton, are all roughly 30 to 40 minutes away. “That concerns me a lot,” said Ellwood City fire chief Rick Myers.
The fire department attends every 911 emergency in the borough. Myers said that last year there were nearly 600 calls. Now that the hospital is closed, this puts a strain on local first responders.
“Somebody may now call 911 for something they may not have before because they could have just drove right up the street,” he said.
When the fire department attends a medical call, they provide immediate care. But they aren’t licensed to transport people to the hospital, instead patients wait until an ambulance arrives. Now that EMS have to drive people out of town, the wait might be hours.