Inpatient
Acute Care
Being admitted to the hospital, in a building four blocks from your house instead of ninety miles away.
Sometimes a problem is too serious to treat and send home, and not serious enough to need a medical center in a city. That middle ground is what our inpatient floor is for.
Typical reasons to end up here: a pneumonia that oral antibiotics did not touch, a diabetic whose blood sugar has gotten away from them, an older adult who stopped eating and drinking, a kidney infection, a heart failure patient carrying too much fluid, a wound that turned.
We are licensed for fifteen beds and we are rarely all full. That has a practical consequence worth stating plainly: the nurse looking after you tonight has a handful of patients rather than a dozen, and she will notice a change in you hours before a monitor would. In a hospital this small, nobody becomes a room number.
Most stays run one to four days. Your own family physician is usually the one rounding on you, and if you need to keep going after the acute problem settles, the swing bed program picks up without moving you to a different building or a different town.
Visiting hours are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and we bend them for people who have driven a long way.