I’m Dr. David Lemak. I’m an Emergency Physician by training and currently am the medical director at Tahoe Forest Urgent Care System. Roughly 25% of the population has been to an urgent care in the past 12 months.
One of the things that we do very well in Urgent Care is take care of folks with mild to moderate problems. It’s a well-recognized resource in the healthcare system. Part of the reason why Urgent Care has developed as rapidly as it has correlates with the difficulty in getting a rapid appointment with the primary care provider for something that can’t wait for a few weeks.
We fill the gap between emergent care, which is where you have someone with a potentially life-threatening problem, and something that can wait for two or three weeks to be managed on a more casual basis by the primary care provider.
So, kinds of things that one would expect to go to urgent care for would be mild infections. We see folks all the time with strep, with flu, with gastroenteritis. Injuries that are more related to overuse, like Achilles tendonitis from doing too much one weekend, to back strains, to fractures. Not necessarily fractures that are severe and need the emergency department, but ones that slip and fall and crack a bone in the wrist or twist an ankle, etc.
Our nurses have developed a program that helps them identify people with potentially life-threatening problems, rapidly get them evaluated, and a provider makes the arrangements to get them transferred over to the emergency department.
I’m Dr. Dave Lemak. Thanks very much for listening about Urgent Care. I hope you don’t have to visit us, but we’re happy to see you when you get there.
