Emergency and Urgent
Emergency Department
Open every hour of every day. Walk in, call 911, or have someone drive you. Sort out the paperwork afterward.
Come in. That is the short version.
The emergency department has a physician and nursing staff on site at every hour, including holidays and the middle of a blizzard. You do not need an appointment, a referral, or an insurance card in your hand.
What we see most: chest pain, trouble breathing, bad falls, cuts that will not close, machinery and livestock injuries, kids with fevers that spiked overnight, and older adults who suddenly are not themselves. Highway 14 also sends us its share of collisions.
One thing that surprises people. You may wait while someone who arrived after you goes straight back. We take patients in the order of how sick they are, not the order they walked in. If your own symptoms change while you are waiting, tell the desk immediately rather than waiting your turn.
Some patients need more than a fifteen bed hospital can give. When that is the case our job is to stabilize you here and move you fast. We have standing transfer arrangements with the referral centers in Wichita and Hutchinson, we can put you in a ground ambulance or a helicopter, and your chart goes ahead of you so the team on the other end is not starting from a blank page.
On cost: hospitals are required by law to examine and stabilize anyone who presents to an emergency department, whatever their insurance situation. We follow that, and we mean it. Do not sit at home with chest pain doing arithmetic.