Filling The Void

Urgent care can deliver in non-emergencies.

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When To Go

Urgent Care Situations:
• Minor asthma-related symptoms
• Minor cuts or animal bites where
bleeding is controlled
• Broken bones or sprains (if bone
is showing or limb is deformed
- go directly to Emergency)
• Skin rashes, sunburns or minor got
burns, such as ones from cookin
• Fever (if younger than 6 months,
go to Emergency)
• Earache, cough and/or sore
throat
• Illness with nausea, vomiting
and/or diarrhea
• Eye infections
• Bladder infections

- Courtesy Henry Ford Hospital-Detroit

Web site

▪ And When
Not To

Yisroel Sigler: "People have to be educated on what is life threatening and what is not."

Judith Doner Berne
Special to the Jewish News

W

hen Yehuda Kranczer's 15-
year-old brother slipped on
the ice, they headed for the
emergency room of a near-by hospital.
Five and a half hours later, Mordechai's
arm had been X-rayed, was in a sling and
they were told to follow up with an ortho-
pedist.
The next afternoon, Kranczer's 9-year-
old son, Avraham, got hit in the elbow
by a kicked soccer ball. Not wanting to
repeat the lengthy hospital experience,
he took a friend's advice and headed
for Meadowbrook Urgent Care in Novi
although it was almost double the drive
from his home.
"We weren't there more than half an
hour:' the Oak Park man said.
That included X-rays, a temporary cast

and filling a pain prescription for the
fracture.
"I was more satisfied with the urgent
care center than the hospital. Unless it
was life threatening, I'd go back in a heart
beat',' Kranczer said.
Begun in the 1970s, urgent care is the
delivery of ambulatory care in a facil-
ity that generally provides unscheduled,
walk-in care outside of a hospital-based
emergency room.
Designed to treat a variety of non-life-
threatening illnesses and injuries more
quickly, at a lower cost, and generally cov-
ered by insurance, urgent care appears to
be growing in popularity.
"Urgent care fills a void between the
primary care office and the ER:' says Dr.
Richard Frank, a board member of the
Oakland County Medical Society and an
anesthesiologist from West Bloomfield.
"Assuming they're appropriately licensed

and staffed and have adequate physi-
cian supervision, we believe they are an
appropriate setting to treat urgent or non-
emergent medical conditions," says Frank,
speaking on behalf of the medical society.
"I think they're taking off across the
country because of a shortage of primary
care physicians and pressure by hospitals,
insurers and employers to use emergency
rooms for true emergencies," he says.

By The Numbers
National research shows more than half
the people who visit a hospital emergency
room don't qualify as true emergencies.
An estimated 9,000 urgent care centers
are part of an ongoing national count,
according to Lou Ellen Horwitz, executive
director of the Urgent Care Association of
America.

Emergency Room Situations:
• Fainting or unconsciousness
• Breathing difficulty, shortness of
breath or choking
• Continuous bleeding
• Coughing up or vomiting blood
• Suicidal or homicidal feelings
• Severe or persistent vomiting
• Chest pain
• Upper abdominal pain or pres-
sure
• Change in mental status (such as
unusual behavior, confusion, dif-
ficulty arousing)
• Head or spine injury
• Sudden, severe pain anywhere in
the body
• Sudden dizziness, weakness or
change in vision
• Ingestion of a poisonous sub-
stance
• Sudden injury like motor vehicle
accident, burns or smoke inha-
lation, near drowning, deep or
large wound, etc.

- Courtesy Find Urgent Care Web site

Filling The Void on page B6

April 24 • 2008

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