Big Sandy Medical Center
Big Sandy Medical Center is a rural health care facility located in Big Sandy, Montana. The facility was built and opened in 1965 as a nine-bed hospital and a physician clinic attached. The community built and opened the facility after conducting a community fund drive. This allowed Big Sandy to build its first health care facility using all donated money, material, and labor. In 1985 the community added a twenty-two bed skilled nursing home attached to the original hospital and clinic.
Today, after several remodel projects, the community has a well built and well staffed hospital, skilled nursing home, and rural health clinic taking care of the community’s health care needs. Big Sandy Medical Center is located at 166 Montana Avenue East in Big Sandy, Montana. The facility is part of an agricultural based community that is located at the foot of the Bear Paw Mountains. Wheat fields and cattle herds are visible signs of the agricultural base along with natural gas wells and small logging operations that supplement the economy.
Big Sandy Medical Center offers acute hospital care, skilled and inter-mediate nursing home care, a family practice clinic, emergency room services, laboratory and radiology services and physical therapy. We also work with other area hospitals and provide mobile services such as dexa-scan and echocardiology and hospice care.
The BSMC laboratory is staffed by licensed medical technologists 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Operating hours are 8:00 am to 5:00 pm Monday through Friday for out patient care while the remaining hours are covered on an emergency on-call basis. We are accredited by the State of Montana and CLIA. We also participate in national proficiency testing programs and our results are compared and graded nationally to determine our continued proficiency.
Our laboratory requires health care providers orders for testing. All test results are stored electronically, placed on charts, phoned, faxed, and/or mailed to the providers as soon as possible.
For a more accurate total cholesterol we must draw the specimen following an overnight {12-14 hour} fast, which means nothing to eat or drink but water. Patient must not consume any alcohol for 24 hours before the specimen is drawn.