St. Mary Medical Center

Emergency Department

Emergency Care

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days per week you'll find a board certified emergency physician, dedicated nurses and technicians, along with full-service imaging and laboratory services ready to provide efficient, quality care for you at St. Mary Medical Center. We also have a wide range of specialists on call for emergency treatment.

Our facilities are designed around patient comfort and service. Our registration staff comes to you to expedite the admission process and quickly move you through to the next phase of your recovery and healing. Our professionally trained, compassionate staff is highly attentive and sensitive to your pain level and will work to reduce your discomfort in a timely fashion. We provide treatment for a full range of minor ailments - earache, sore throat, sinus infection, abrasion, simple laceration or minor fracture - but also are ready and prepared at all times in cases of life-threatening conditions, such as heart attacks.

St. Mary Medical Center is proud to be chosen as a finalist in the 2007 BKD Indiana Excellence Awards for emergency care to heart attack patients. Our Emergency Department (ED) and Cardiac Catheterization (Cath) Lab team time is consistently below the recommended door-to-balloon standard in patient care. Door-to-balloon time refers to the interval between patient arrival to the Emergency Department and inflation of a balloon catheter within the patient's blocked coronary artery. Key national organizations, including The American College of Cardiology and American Hospital Association, have set the standard as 90 minutes or less for those patients with ST segment elevation myocardial infarction or STEMI (heart attack due to coronary blockage) who come to the hospital for treatment. Nationwide, about 200,000 people have heart attacks caused by blockages in arteries supplying the heart with blood. About half of those patients die from this type of heart attack. Studies indicate that reopening clogged arteries by inflating a tiny balloon at the site of the blockage is the best way to treat a severe heart attack. The procedure, called balloon angioplasty, may reduce a patient's risk of dying by about 40 percent if it is completed within 90 minutes of the patient arrival to the hospital - the "door-to-balloon" time.

This is yet another example of how St. Mary has adopted some of the best practices in medicine today to help our patients enjoy a longer, better quality of life.