Summer Days Are Busiest for Island Medical Center
By Eric Fish

The Mackinac Island Medical Center is a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week, 365-daysa year operation on the Island. Currently, the medical center is in the middle of its busy season, where it sees various types of injuries and ailments and serves about 30 people on a daily basis through regular business hours.

"Summer is always busy for us," said Dr. Don Weersing, Mackinac Island's only fulltime, year-around physician.

On Tuesday, July 24, the emergency vehicle made 12 trips, the total number of runs it usually makes from November through April. For the month of July, the ambulance made about 50 trips.

To help in the summer, more than 20 resident physicians spend two-week residency tours from hospitals downstate. Three nurses, two secretaries, and six emergency medical technicians also work out of the medical center.

"Everyday is different," Dr. Weersing said of the summer season. "You just can't predict what's going to come through the door."

The majority of patients are tourists, but Dr. Weersing said Island workers and residents also come in for care with ongoing medical problems.

"We are a family practice for the Island community yeararound," he said, and the emergency room is equipped like any modern emergency room on the mainland.

About 20 percent of emergency room visits are for orthopedic injuries, he estimates, and another 15 percent are for abrasions and lacerations.

The rest, he said, is "just a mix of anything you could possibly imagine," including injuries related to horseback riding.

"Horses aren't high percentage, but certainly significant," he said. It's mostly "people falling off or being squished between a tree and a horse, kicks, and getting stepped on."

The most injuries seen at the medical center are related to bicycles.

"Bicycles are far and away the biggest thing," Dr. Weersing said. "I think one of the big things with bicycles is the tourists come here and haven't ridden bikes for quite a while and now they're thrown into a congested street and still uncomfortable with riding bikes."

Dr. Weersing started working on Mackinac Island as a resident in training, then worked in the metro-Detroit area and was a professor at Grand Valley State University in the physician assistant program. In 2003, he returned to Mackinac Island as the yeararound physician.

Dr. Weersing is on call 24 hours a day and said that in the summertime, he's normally called in after hours just about every day of the week. In the winter months, he said he gets called in after hours about once a week.

He monitors the summer resident doctors during their two-week stints at the facility.

"I like teaching," he said. "It's an enjoyable part of the practice."