Mackinac Straits Health System sits in St. Ignace and covers a lot of ground when it comes to care, sort of like this big campus where the main piece is Mackinac Straits Hospital and then there's the St. Ignace Tribal Health Clinic & Human Services Center, so you've got both regular hospital services and tribal health care together in the same building, but each does its own thing, and they work together too. Since 2010, the current two-story hospital's been running with about 82,000 square feet of space, lots of wheelchair access, air conditioning, bathrooms, and customer parking, accepting credit cards and such, so no one's left without somewhere to sit or cool off, and folks don't have to worry too much about payment options. Mackinac County owns and runs it, but they've gone through tough times with just three to five days of money on hand here and there, and at one point the old building was so out of date and short on doctors it held everyone back from expanding, but with financial help from the USDA, local donations, and the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians pitching in money and land, they built this new place to help the community grow along with its needs.
The Sault Ste. Marie Tribe runs the tribal clinic part, and with their own health staff, they care for the tribal community nearby, while Mackinac Straits looks after the rest, so both sides have a strong presence and work together on big health projects. Lots of services fit under one roof: there are regular hospital rooms, an ER that's open 24/7, a Fast Care walk-in open seven days a week from 10 in the morning to 7 at night, a pharmacy, imaging like X-rays all day, mammograms, bone scans, labs, a renal dialysis center, and clinics in places like Bois Blanc Island, Cheboygan, Mackinaw City, Mackinac Island, and again right in St. Ignace. You see they've got a special wound clinic upstairs called Mackinac Straits Advanced Wound Center, with trained experts handling serious, slow-to-heal wounds using both the latest medical tech and traditional methods, which helps folks get back on their feet faster. They run programs like cardiovascular rehab, diabetic education, drug screenings, surgeries, oncology, therapies like physical, occupational, and speech, along with hospice, respite care, and even a swing bed program for people who need more time to recover.
Long-term care runs through the Evergreen Living Center, which offers 75 beds for seniors or patients who need ongoing help, and then there's an assisted living center if someone wants more independence but still likes to have support close by. Their staff, now over 400 people, handle more than 65,000 patients every year. They have this surgical robot named "Hope"-a local contest picked the name-and every patient gets an electronic medical record, so their doctors all see the same info, which really helps keep things from falling through the cracks. They have ties to the Upper Peninsula Health Care Network and keep up with both regular and emergency medicine, no matter how busy things get. Over time the hospital's raised more than $3.5 million in a single year for equipment and upgrades, showing the community's always involved.
While they strive for good care, and they value people from different backgrounds, the hospital's been around since 1954 in different forms, always adapting, now calling itself a nonprofit that wants to be a place people go for honest, affordable, and innovative health care, without fancy frills, just practical services and a focus on getting better. It's one big team effort, mixing tradition, technology, tribal care, and county roots.
