New Emergency Room Is Open 24 Hours a Day
Posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025
Kari Cochran, PA-C, was the Physician Assistant
on Duty when the Emergency Room opened on September 2, 2025
Around-the-clock medical care has returned to Marietta, OK!
At 7 a.m. September 2, 2025, a temporary Emergency Room opened on the campus of Mercy Health Love County Hospital at 300 Wanda St.
The 2,500-square-foot modular building occupies the east end of the clinic parking lot. The walk-in entrance is at the north end. The ER will be staffed 24 hours a day for walk-in and ambulance emergencies.
Physician assistants, nurses, laboratory technologists, respiratory therapists, and radiology technicians will be on duty daily.
This is as close to normal as medical services have been since a tornado on April 27, 2024, heavily damaged the hospital.
"With the opening of the temporary emergency room we have every service back that we had lost, including laboratory and radiology, so patients can be served in Marietta and not have to travel," said hospital administrator Scott Callender.
Chela Santibanez, RN, nurse manager in the ER, said at 4 p.m. that foot traffic on opening day had been steady. “It is not chaotic but patients have been coming in steadily all day. There have been no ambulance emergencies so far.”
For most of the staff, Tuesday was their first day back at work since the tornado. “We are all excited and happy to be back serving the community,” Santibanez said.
Kari Cochran, longtime PA in the emergency department was the Physician Assistant on duty. Physicians of Mercy Health Love County Hospital and Clinic are on-call.
The emergency room contains three treatment bays and a trauma room, as well as a complete laboratory.
A high-powered GE Rev Evo CT Scanner System is in a trailer designed for its use on the south end of the building. Blake Scott, director of imaging services, said at 128-slices, the unit is the most powerful CT in Southern Oklahoma.
Other new equipment in the ER includes a GlideScope, on whose screen is projected an image of the patient’s airway as an intubation device is inserted to provide breathing assistance;
a Stryker Lifepak 15, which is a defibrillator to shock the heart into pumping blood and a monitor to continuously measure the heart’s strength; a Mindray Ultrasound machine; and a Hamilton Medical C1 adult and pediatric ventilator.
In the laboratory, a Siemens Dimension EXL 2000 Integrated Chemistry System, which had been acquired six months before the tornado, survived the storm and will once again, be the workhorse.
The machine is capable of performing more than 400 laboratory tests per hour. A menu of up to 47 tests can be performed on a single blood or body fluid sample.
Newly-acquired is a Sysmex XN-450 tester for analyzing blood disorders.
A doctor's clinic and the therapy building for physical and speech therapy have been open on the medical campus since last summer.
What is still missing is inpatient care. That awaits the repair or replacement of the hospital building itself.
The administrator expects federal emergency management authorities to give the go-ahead on hospital construction soon.
If so, FEMA will pay the largest part of the cost of a new hospital outside of insurance coverage on the old building.
See the hospital website, www.mercyhealthlovecounty.com, for more pictures of the emergency room and the new equipment inside.
Blake ScGE Rev Evo CT Scanner Systemott, Director of Imagine Services,
peeks through the portal of the GE Rev Evo CT Scanner System. The
128-slice unit in the Emergency Room at Mercy Health Love County
is the most powerful CT in southern Oklahoma.
Exterior signage was applied to the Emergency Room in August. The
2,500-square-foot building is at the east end of the clinic parking
lot of Mercy Health Love County Hospital, 300 Wanda St., Marietta, OK