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July 3, 2008

Lake Placid ER to remain open 24/7

By KIM SMITH DEDAM

LAKE PLACID -- Adirondack Medical Center has resolved staffing issues at its Lake Placid emergency room.

Officials have scrapped any option to reroute night-shift emergency medical care to Saranac Lake.

No contingency plan to close Lake Placid emergency facilities between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. will be necessary now, AMC spokesman Joe Riccio said Wednesday.

"We made the decision Tuesday that we would not need to implement the contingency plan for the month of July."

The plan, set only in case "the need should arise," applied only to July, when increased traffic from summer visitors places added strain on AMC staffing schedules.

"There are fewer people to fill the shorter shifts, so we would have had to close the Lake Placid ER between the hours of 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.," Riccio explained. "By August, we would have been back to normal with the staff.

"But all that is moot now. Our physician recruiter worked very hard the past few weeks to get the staff up to where it needs to be.

"We've hired an emergency room doctor. The Lake Placid ER will remain open 24 hours a day, seven days a week this summer and beyond."

The contingency plan looked only to solve a possible problem before it began.

"It is a public-safety issue," Riccio said. "Key people from emergency services have been involved throughout this process."

The new Lake Placid emergency room hire doesn't ease potential long-term effects of physician shortages in the North Country.

And it doesn't mean that area medical care isn't stretched thin.

"For the foreseeable future, we're OK," Riccio said. "But the physician shortage in the North Country continues to have a significant impact on health-care facilities. This is going to be an ongoing situation -- we're talking months into the future."

kdedam@pressrepublican.com

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