There isn’t much of a wait these days in the waiting room of Haywood Regional Medical Center. Twenty slow minutes passed on Friday afternoon without a soul entering the formerly bustling area.

It was busier upstairs, where the hospital’s cafeteria was filled with customers — all sporting scrubs and hospital ID cards. Nurses, staff and an occasional doctor sat chatting and killing time, their conversations punctuated with laughter in attempts to keep the mood upbeat.

The rest of the facility — with the exception of the fourth floor nursery —was a ghost town. The lights on the fifth floor were out and the waiting area sat empty. On the sixth floor, construction workers seized the opportunity to hammer away without bothering anyone. Rooms in the outpatient surgery wing had their doors open, revealing a somewhat eerie display of neatly made beds with crisp white sheets hoping for a patient to fill them.

With HRMC’s patient count hovering somewhere around 11 — it was 73 the same week last year — it’s not easy to fill beds.

Fast forward to Monday morning at Westcare in Sylva. The bustling atmosphere is in sharp contrast to the one at HRMC. In this waiting area — larger than the one at HRMC — almost every chair is occupied. Names are called continuously, the front desk has a small but constant line, and car after car pulls up around front to pick up or drop off a patient.

Some are hesitant to share their name for this article because of medical privacy concerns, but one woman does share her story. She’s in the same situation as many others who’ve been here recently. The woman is accompanying her mother, who is about to have surgery. The mother rescheduled the procedure at WestCare because of the HRMC Medicare crisis. The surgery is in a different location than the mother is used to, but neither that fact nor the drive bothers the pair. The biggest inconvenience is the wait — at the moment, two hours and counting.

The extended waiting period could be due to the increase in the number of patients coming to WestCare from HRMC. According to Lucretia Stargell, marketing and public relations coordinator for Westcare, admissions from Haywood County have more than tripled — from 16 in February to 67 in March.

Ambulance transports

Meanwhile, Emergency Medical Services in Haywood County are keeping busy transporting patients around the clock to WestCare in Sylva and Mission in Asheville.

Ambulances are only taking patients to HRMC if the situation is an emergency. Once they’re stabilized, the patient is transported to either Mission or Westcare — whichever one they personally choose. Haywood County EMS Director Jamie Pressley says WestCare has turned away patients a few times because it simply did not have room for them.

The drive time to Mission is 30 to 35 minutes, depending on traffic, Pressley said. Ambulances sometimes have trouble navigating through the construction near exit 44 on I-40, or when there are back ups and accidents along the route.

The drive time to WestCare in Sylva is about 25 minutes.

The extra distance is eating up gasoline for the ambulances.

“We’re obviously putting more miles on the trucks, without a doubt,” Pressley said.

The high costs of fuel and limited gas budget given to ambulances means the county may have to move around some money to keep the ambulances fueled.

Presley says EMS will keep doing the services needed, no matter how many hours of driving it takes.

“As a county-based system, we’ll do this as long as it’s necessary. The county commissioners are acutely aware of what we’re doing and what’s going on. We’ll continue to do what we’re doing as long as it’s needed,” he said.