Health Care

Local Health Care Delivery

There are two large medical organizations serving the area, one based in Elizabethtown and Plattsburgh and the other in Saranac Lake. Mountain Health is a relatively new option. Essex County Public Health is a good resource and there are some other resources on the web.

The Elizabethtown Community Hospital is affiliated with the Champlain Valley Plattsburgh Medical Center and owned by the same parent company.  It has a nursing unit (25 beds) as well as an emergency room, lab services, PT and sports rehab, radiology services.  The Horace Nye Nursing Home in Elizabethtown is operated by Essex County.

The Adirondack Medical Center run the regional hospital in Saranac Lake and the Mountain Health Center in Keene.  It also operates the old Lake Placid Hospital as a medical center with 24 hour emergency services, full time medical staff, lab, imaging, sports medicine and dental services.  Lastly AMC owns and operates the Mercy Uihlein Nursing Home in Lake Placid.

Details on the Mountain Health Center in Keene are:

 

 

Mountain Medical Services offers walk-in care offices in Lake Placid and Saranac Lake.  The Saranac Lake office is open every day.

Essex County Public Health offers immunization programs, well-child programs and the like.  Perhaps most importantly, it can help organize home health care services for you.  You can review their pregnancy services here. They also offer a variety of immunization services and clinics.  Anonymous HIV testing is also offered by the county. 

The County Health site offers two excellent referral lists.  The best is a link to a listing called Peer Portal where you need to scroll down to "Health Care Information Suport" then click on the small arrow to the left of the text.  This will open a long list of specialized health care resources including HIV, Alzheimers. brain injuries, learning disabilities, and more.  Community Connections open to a list of links to services for children, mental health, substance abuse, and smoking cessation, etc.

There are a wide variety of medical resources and services on the web.  My personal favorite is an online version of a very old-fashioned text called The Merck Manual (see this link for different versions).  It is a very easy to use and it has a long history (starting in 1899) of being edited by medical professionals and by the 1980s was the worlds largest selling medical textbook.