Walk into Palisades Medical Center's emergency room along the Hudson River on a given afternoon and you'll likely see families cramped in a tiny waiting room, a few patients on hospital beds lining the hallways and doctors and nurses buzzing around trying to attend to the overflow.
The emergency room in this Hackensack Meridian hospital had been adequate when it opened in 1978 in North Bergen. The riverfront was largely a rust belt of closed factories and docks.
But over the past 25 years apartment and condominium towers began sprouting up on those former industrial sites. The emergency room slowly became too small to handle the population surge of 100,000 new residents in 10 towns surrounding the hospital.
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Now, Palisades is unveiling plans to build a new $50 million emergency department that will double its footprint to 22,000 square feet. A groundbreaking ceremony was scheduled for Thursday at the hospital, on River Road.
"We're very busy for a community hospital," said Lisa Iachetti, president of Palisades and a former emergency room nurse. "And the population continues to grow."
Bergen-based hospital expand into Hudson County
The expansion also marks another move by Hackensack Meridian, a Bergen County based hospital system, to increase its footprint in Hudson County — a place that continues to attract young, wealthy or upwardly mobile residents from New York but whose health care system has lagged behind.
Jersey City Medical Center, owned by RWJBarnabas, the state's second largest health care network, remains a county mainstay. But three Care Point hospitals in Hoboken, Jersey City and Bayonne are struggling so much that as many as 2,600 workers may be laid off by year's end.
Bergen County hospitals, including Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck and Englewood Health, have taken notice. They have begun establishing beachheads in Hudson County with doctor's offices, urgent care centers and other outpatient services in recent years.
But Hackensack Meridian is the only one that has a full-fledged hospital in Hudson County, right on the border of its traditional Bergen County patient base. Palisades is one of 18 hospitals owned by Hackensack Meridian in New Jersey.
"We look at it not as how important Hudson County is to Hackensack Meridian, but how important Hackensack Meridian is to Hudson County," said Mark Sparta, president of the network's North Region. "The needs here are vast and there has to be access to quality care."
While Hackensack Meridian has expanded its outpatient and ambulatory services in Hudson County in recent years, Sparta said the health care giant is not looking to buy CarePoint's three distressed hospitals.
Instead the network wants to invest more into Palisades, which has had 56,000 emergency room visits in 2024, a 3% increase from this time last year.
ER will expand to 50 patient bays from 33
To deal with the growth, the new emergency room will be expanded to 50 patient bays from 33. Sixty new health care workers will be hired in the first two years. An area for non-acute patients will grow from 8 to 15 spaces. A separate area will be carved out for behavioral health and pediatrics — a special need with all the new housing going up in the area.
"We're seeing more and more children come into Palisades and that's a result of the population change," Sparta said. "We're looking to make it a much better environment for kids so they're not co-mingled with adults."
Plans for the new emergency room began at the end of 2022. An area that housed cardiac and respiratory care was moved to the second floor to make room for the expansion. Construction is slated to begin soon in phases to minimize disturbance to the current emergency room. It is slated to open by the third quarter of 2026, Iachetti said.
Because it is situated between the river and the cliffs with only one road running past it, Palisades has an outsized role in the area because it is harder for residents to leave for hospitals in Bergen County.
"It's not easy to get into our area, so Palisades plays an important role," Sparta said. "Access to care has always been a challenge and hopefully this alleviates some of that."
Population surge
Development along New Jersey's Hudson River has boomed over the past 20 years, leading to a population surge from 2000 to 2020.
- Fort Lee +4,000
- Edgewater +7,000
- Cliffside Park +2,500
- Fairview +2,000
- North Bergen: +5,000
- Guttenberg +1,000
- West New York: +7,000
- Weehawken: +4,000
- Hoboken +20,000
- Jersey City +50,000
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: New ER coming to North Jersey as hospitals deal with population boom
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