Emergency? Call 911.
Our emergency rooms are open 24/7, holidays included.
Health Library
What We Cannot Do, Said Plainly
Published September 17, 2026 · 4 min read
If this may be life-threatening, call 911 and go to the nearest emergency room. The nearest one — not ours if something closer exists.
Most healthcare websites are a list of capabilities. This is the other list.
It exists because a capability list on its own is not information — everybody has one, they all read the same, and none of them tells you the thing you actually need to know, which is where the edges are. So here are ours.
We cannot admit you
Our emergency rooms are freestanding: emergency departments without an inpatient hospital attached. There are no beds upstairs, because there is no upstairs.
What we can do is hold and monitor you for up to 24 hours where observation is the right call. What we cannot do is admit you for a stay. Where you need that, we treat and stabilise you here and arrange the transfer, with your imaging and results travelling with you. The detail is in what happens if you need to be admitted.
We cannot operate
No operating theatres and no surgical services. Where a problem needs surgery, our job is to identify that quickly, stabilise, and get you to a facility that can do it — which is a genuinely useful thing to be good at, and it is not the same as being able to do the operation.
We are not a pediatric emergency room
And we treat children every day. Both halves, every time.
Our emergency rooms are equipped and staffed to assess and stabilise a child. A paediatric emergency department — paediatric emergency specialists, paediatric intensive care, the full range of subspecialties in one building — is a different institution, and where a child needs that level of care we arrange the transfer rather than keep them.
Ultrasound is not in the building
CT, X-ray and a full laboratory are. Ultrasound is called in from an outside mobile service — often during the visit if it is ordered early enough, otherwise scheduled for the next day.
This gets stated separately on every page where imaging is mentioned, because the difference between “in the building” and “called in” is exactly the difference a patient waiting for an answer experiences.
We cannot promise you a wait time, and we will not
The next ambulance decides the day. Any emergency room advertising a fixed wait is either not a real emergency room or is about to break the promise.
What we will say is structural, because it is true by construction rather than by effort: there is no inpatient hospital attached, so we are not absorbing admissions or ambulance diversions for a campus; it is one department rather than a site; and everyone in the building is an emergency patient. None of that is a promise about your visit.
And the reframe that is actually true: a long wait usually means you are not the sickest person in the building, which is good news about you.
We cannot be your doctor
An emergency room is built for the next hour. It is very good at excluding the dangerous possibility and comparatively poor at everything that comes after, because the answers to those questions live in a history we do not have.
A blood pressure reading here is a number. Three of them over eighteen months is a direction, and the direction is what changes what anybody should do. That is what a clinic is for, and a good emergency visit often ends by pointing you at one.
We cannot always be the right door
Two emergency rooms cover a lot of the Valley and nothing like all of it. For anything life-threatening, go to the nearest emergency department — and call 911, because paramedics know which facilities are receiving and which have the specialty your condition needs.
Minutes matter more than continuity. A site that spent those minutes on brand loyalty would be doing something indefensible.
What this list is not
It is not a list of reasons to stay home. Nothing here tells you your symptom does not qualify, and no page on this site does. An emergency is whatever it feels like to the person having it, and nobody can rank their own symptoms from the inside.
If you are unsure, come in — this is not exhaustive and you are not expected to diagnose yourself. Being assessed and sent home reassured is a good outcome. Coming in and being told it was minor costs you an evening; the other way of being wrong cannot be undone.
Why publish this at all
Because a page that only lists what we can do trains you to discount everything we say. When another page on this site tells you something needs an emergency room tonight, we want that sentence to carry weight — and it only does if the same site is willing to tell you where the edges are.
That is a credibility strategy rather than modesty, and we would rather be straight about that too.
Both of our emergency rooms are open 24 hours a day, every day of the year — walk in, no appointment and no referral, with CT, X-ray and a full laboratory in the building. And if somewhere else is closer when it matters, go there. Find your nearest emergency room →
Related reading: what a freestanding emergency room is · why we sometimes send you somewhere else
If it might be an emergency, treat it as one. Both of our emergency rooms are open 24 hours a day, every day of the year — walk in, no appointment and no referral.
Find your nearest emergency room →About your bill, before you worry about it
Ability to pay is not a barrier to assessment and access to care in our emergency rooms — by law. An emergency visit bills at emergency rates, which are not clinic rates, and we would rather tell you that now than have you find out afterwards.
If anything you receive after a visit is unclear, call the facility you were seen at before you pay it. They hold the record of your visit, and they would rather explain a statement than have you pay something you do not owe.