When you have to be in the hospital, you want to make sure the people who are caring for you are top-rate. Your nurses and nursing assistants manage your around-the-clock needs, and they receive direction from hospitalists — doctors specifically trained to care for hospitalized patients.
Hospitalists work 24/7 and stay in constant communication with your primary care provider, specialists and other members of your care team.
They're able to be at the bedside promptly and spend significant time with you so you can follow up on test results and changes to your condition. Hospitalists also play an important role in coordinating your care before you are discharged from the hospital.
Hospitalist services
Columbus Community Hospital offers both adult and pediatric hospitalist programs. The adult hospitalist group, Columbus Hospital Medicine (CHM), cares for patients 18 and older. All of the CHM hospitalists are board-certified, internal medicine physicians.
In the pediatric hospitalist program, pediatricians from Columbus Children’s Healthcare take care of all children hospitalized at CCH. Each hospitalist also provides care for the same children throughout their entire hospital stay, which provides continuity of care and better communication with families.
Intensive and acute care units
When you are in the hospital, it's important that you receive the right level of care for your illness or injury. Columbus Community Hospital's intensive care unit (ICU) and acute care unit (ACU) have compassionate, caring staff who are dedicated to working closely with your providers to provide safe, quality care.
The ICU is our critical care unit, where we care for our sickest patients. In this unit, you will be connected to a heart monitor, and our highly trained nurses will check on you at least once an hour. The nurses in this unit have received special training in caring for critically ill patients. The ICU also serves as our pediatric unit — our nurses also have the training required to care for children from infants through 12 years old.
In the ICU, there are nine monitored beds with new technology and wireless monitoring capability for all of our patient rooms. The rooms are centered around a mini station that allows nurses to be close to their patients at all times.
Down the hall, we care for our general population of patients in the ACU. You will stay in this unit if you need hospital care but do not require the same level of monitoring as in the ICU. You may need to stay in the ACU if you fall and fracture a hip, or if you have breathing problems because of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or pneumonia. The ACU has 25 private patient rooms — each with plenty of space for your loved ones to stay close to you during your stay at the hospital.