Clinic moves to Woman’s campus
LSU Health’s outpatient women’s clinic has a new home on the Woman’s Hospital campus.
Effective Monday, obstetrics and gynecology patients will go to the fourth floor of Woman’s Physician Office Building for appointments.
Services through last week had been provided at LSU’s north Baton Rouge clinic located at 5439 Airline Highway — near the LSU Earl K. Long Medical Center, also on Airline Highway — about 6 miles north of the new location. The new Woman’s complex is off Airline Highway near Pecue Lane at 500 Rue de la Vie.
Woman’s Hospital already has a contract for inpatient obstetrics and gynecology services with LSU.
The move of the outpatient care piece will consolidate care on one campus making it easier on patients as well as physicians and physicians-in-training delivering their care, said Dr. Briana Wellington, assistant professor of clinical OB-GYN at LSU Health.
Pre-operation evaluation and post-operation care have been delivered at the north Baton Rouge clinic, but the surgeries were performed at Woman’s, Wellington said. Having both services in the same location will minimize travel for lab work and evaluation.
“It will help us be a little more efficient in the services we provide,” Wellington said. “Patients have seemed to be pretty receptive to the move. It does not seem to be a barrier to patient accessibility. But only time will tell.”
About 18,000 poor and uninsured patients a year are seen at the north Baton Rouge clinic site — about 1,500 outpatient visits a month.
Sixteen OB-GYN residents get physician training through the program. It is a four-year training program — with four residents added each year. In addition, some Baton Rouge General Medical Center family practice residents rotate through the outpatient setting. Wellington oversees the OB-GYN resident training.
“Our services have been spread out between the clinic and Woman’s Hospital,” Wellington said. “There’s been a lot of travel.”
Wellington said the consolidation will allow outpatient service days to increase from 11/2 days a week to 21/2 days.
For physicians in training, “It will help consolidate that learning experience,” Wellington said. “It will help on the patient care side in terms of being able to provide patient care more expeditiously.”
“The more sites you have, the more spread out your education and faculty are. There will be more faculty for resident support and patient care because we will all be in the same place.”
As an extra benefit, the clinic will be able to provide “more high-risk obstetrics services,” she said.
The distance got longer between the outpatient and inpatient service settings when Woman’s moved in August from Airline Highway and Goodwood Boulevard.
The new campus contains a five-story hospital, two medical office buildings, a support services building and a central energy plant on 216 acres.
Woman’s Hospital Senior Vice President of Medical Staff Services Nancy Crawford welcomed “more families to our campus. It furthers our promise to improve the health of women and infants within our community.”