BATON ROUGE – Our Lady of the Lake officials and community leaders broke ground on a new emergency room in North Baton Rouge on Tuesday morning.

The emergency room is expected to open in October 2017. The facility will be staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week by emergency physicians along with Emergency Medicine residents, similar to staffing at the Our Lady of the Lake emergency rooms at the main campus on Essen Lane and in Livingston Parish. An 8,000-square foot addition is being made to the LSU Health Baton Rouge North Clinic on Airline Highway to house the new emergency room.

The new facility will have eight treatment rooms capable of expanding to 11 treatment spaces. It will be able to provide CT scans and X-rays and will include a full-service lab and pharmacy on-site. The facility will also include a trauma room, a bariatric room, an isolation room, an ultrasound room and OB/GYN room and an ambulance bay.

The emergency room is expected to treat 11,000 patients a year and around 44,000 urgent care patients. The state provided a one-time payment on $5.5 million to build and staff the emergency room as a part of its public-private partnership agreement with Our Lady of the Lake.

Governor John Bel Edwards said that since his mother was a nurse, he knows what it means for others to have access to healthcare services.

"My mother is a retired emergency room nurse, so I've seen just how important it is for both healthcare workers and communities to have ready access to quality emergency services," Edwards said. I am grateful to everyone involved in making this possible, especially Our Lady of the Lake and the community leaders who have carried this fight for nearly two years."