The Iberia Medical Center Board of Commissioners approved contracting with an engineer to determine how much work will be needed to reopen the emergency room at the hospital’s North Campus during its regular meeting Thursday night.

“This is to make sure the emergency room on the North Campus meets code and can be put back into service,” said IMC Chief Executive Officer Dionne Viator. “We would like to authorize up to $100,000 for the study, although it will probably be considerably less.”

The emergency room at the North Campus, the former Dauterive Hospital, has been out of service since IMC took over the building in 2015.

“Most of the work that needs to be done to get it back into service is on the mechanical side,” Viator said as she noted that bringing the ER back would cost somewhere in the area of $1 million.

“The engineering is to figure out how to get from here to there,” she said. “We’re talking about a space that has not been utilized in five years.”

The board also granted a certificate of completion for a new clean room for the hospital’s pharmacy on the main campus. That room will be used for mixing chemotherapy medications, a process that requires a sterile environment.

The board also approved a capital request for $66,496 to purchase a refurbished C-Arm fluoroscopic imaging machine. The device is used to visualise patients’ anatomy in an operating room during surgery and wil replace an existing machine that is being taken out of service.

The board also welcomed Aquicline Rener-Arnold, who assumed the seat left vacant after the death of Ernest Wilson last month.

Dwayne Fatherree is the community editor for The Daily Iberian. He can be reached at dwayne.fatherree@daily-iberian.com.