Kaiser Hospital to Double Capacity of ER

A planned expansion and renovation of the emergency room at the Kaiser Foundation hospital in Panorama City will have no adverse impact on medical services at the hospital, officials said this week.

The expansion, which began Monday and will double the space available for handling emergencies, will take place in two phases, officials said. The first phase involves remodeling areas adjacent to the emergency room. When that is complete, emergency department functions will be moved into that area.

In phase 2, the current emergency area will be remodeled, and the two areas will then be connected, officials said. The project is scheduled to be completed by May.

“It’s really a significant increase in the size of the room,” said Dev Mahadevan, the hospital’s administrator. “We had an old emergency room that happened to be really small. . . . This won’t affect our emergency services at all,” he emphasized. The hospital was built in the early ‘60s, Mahadevan said.

When the renovations are complete, the hospital’s emergency room will have doubled its capacity to treat injured or sick patients, from the current 30 to nearly 60, Mahadevan said.

Kaiser’s Panorama City hospital is located at 13652 Cantara St.