Which type of care is best for your needs?

Primary Care

Visit a primary care doctor or clinic for routine care, vaccinations, and screenings, as well as minor infections, allergies, illness, or injuries.

  • Pulled muscles, sprains, and strains
  • Minor cuts or wounds
  • Skin rashes and allergic reactions
  • Vaccinations and routine tests
  • Pediatric care and wellness visits

Appointments: (530) 582-6205

Learn more:
View a full list of providers

Urgent Care

Visit the urgent care clinic with an injury or illness that is not life threatening but requires treatment within 24 hours.

  • Cuts requiring stitches
  • Minor broken bones or burns
  • Allergic reactions or animal bites
  • Urinary tract infection
  • Nausea and vomiting
  • Earache or eye infection

Appointments: (530) 550-6748
Truckee clinic offers walk-ins only

Walk-in: View locations

Reserve your spot: On My Way

Learn more:
Urgent Care Clinics

Emergency Room

Go to an Emergency Room immediately if you experience a life threatening injury or illness, including fever in a newborn less than 3 months old.

  • Chest pain
  • Difficulty breathing
  • Severe burn or uncontrolled bleeding
  • Sudden or severe pain
  • Vomiting blood
  • Intense, crushing headache
  • Sudden dizziness or change in vision
  • Loss of consciousness
  • Seizures or convulsions
  • Severe vomiting
  • Broken bone or deep wound
  • Fever in newborns less than 3 months

Walk in:
Tahoe Forest Hospital

Incline Village Community Hospital

Learn more:
Emergency Department

Urgent Care versus Primary Care

Hi, I’m Dr. David Lemak, Tahoe Forest Urgent Care Medical Director. I was asked to talk to you today about how to decide when it’s appropriate for you to go to a primary care provider versus going to urgent care.

That’s a pretty straightforward question if you have an acute health care need and you don’t have a primary care provider. If you’re new to the area, or in between doctors, or you’re in a different city than you normally live, if you have an acute health care need, urgent care is the right location for you.

Now, that said, primary care does many things exceptionally well. They do comprehensive health care, they get to know you as a person, your family, they know all the complexities of your health and you. So, for comprehensive preventive care, it can’t beat primary care. They’re also the right location to go to for keeping up to date with your vaccines, making sure you have your medications adjusted correctly, et cetera.

But what if you can’t get in to see them in a timely fashion and you have something a bit more pressing, like you have maybe a broken ankle? So if you have something like maybe an ankle injury, or you’ve got a pretty bad sore throat, or your child has an earache, well, all of those things could potentially be managed in primary care, but they’re really not capable of doing it as efficiently as urgent care can do this. Why? Because we have x-ray on site, we have point of care lab testing on site. So we’re able to manage your acute health care needs in a much more timely fashion.

Wherever you end up at Tahoe Forest, we’re going to take really good care of you. And if you end up going to urgent care, we’re never going to say, “Oh, you should have gone to your primary care provider,” and the primary care provider, if they need for you to go to urgent care, will tell you to do so.

So thanks again for listening.

Urgent Care versus Emergency Room

Hi, I’m Dr. David Lemak, Tahoe Forest Urgent Care Medical Director. I was asked to talk to you today about how to decide when it’s appropriate for a patient to go to urgent care versus going to the emergency department. Why? Because we at Tahoe Forest want you, the patient, to be at the right location for the care you need at that time.

So, that said, what are the kind of pros and cons of going to the ER versus urgent care? Well, almost everybody understands what the ER can do, and they’re there 24-7. They’re capable of handling all kinds of life-threatening disorders. They can do all kinds of advanced testing.

They have access to specialists. You can be admitted directly to the hospital once you’ve been seen in the ED. Ambulances always go to the emergency department.

What’s the downside? Well, we all know that a co-pay for the ER can be pretty high by comparison to other locations. Wait times are often a bit longer in the ER. It’s not a quiet environment.

It’s stressful. There’s lots of pretty sick and injured people in the ER that you may have to share some space with. And it may not be the right location for minor or urgent kinds of care.

That said, the ER generally sees about one-third of their cases as really truly emergent. So they do have the capability of handling less severe things, certainly, as well. Why urgent care then? Well, it turns out that urgent care developed out of a need by all of us for a place where we can go to take care of things quickly, but usually wait times are pretty short in urgent care.

It’s perfect for minor illnesses. I guess the best way of kind of distinguishing between minor and going to the urgent care and maybe needing to go to the ER is severe. Think of the word severe.

If whatever the patient has is a severe condition, they’re better off going to the ER. What’s the downside to going to urgent care if you happen to have something that might need to go to the ER? Well, we would have to transfer you over there. And that’s not an unusual occurrence, but we’d rather have you in the right place at the right time.

One of the other reasons why people might get sent from urgent care to the ER is because of the capacity for advanced testing and specialty access. So what would be some examples? You know, if you’ve got chest pain, you’ve got somebody who thinks you might have stroke-like symptoms, they have a severe injury, especially like a motor vehicle accident, a fall off of a mountain bike going downhill, they have severe abdominal pain, they have had a loss of consciousness or a seizure, they have what seems to be a severe allergic reaction, serious burns, big lacerations, clearly broken bones — that goes to the ER. Go to urgent care.

Well, clearly, we can manage very well those things that would be categorized as sprains and strains, minor lacerations, earaches, sore throats, mild asthma-related conditions, urinary tract infections, just about any kind of a rash, and then anything that requires like a refill of something and you can’t get into your primary care provider. Those are all perfectly appropriate for urgent care. So thanks for watching.

I’m Dr. David Lemak, Urgent Care Medical Director at Tahoe Forest. We’re glad to see you wherever you need to be, and hopefully this provides you some assistance in deciding where you should go when the need arises.