Urgent Care Clinics Co-located in Primary Care Centers a Possible Solution to Our ED Crisis

ED Crisis Shows the Need for Urgent Care Clinics

This write-up focuses on the solutions of ED crisis or overcrowding and here urgent care clinics in primary care centers have been suggested as one of the solutions.

We will discuss possible solutions and how urgent care clinics can potentially solve the ED crisis problems. As the concept of Urgent Care Clinics caught on in the United States and other parts of the world, but Australia has not yet designed primary care in such a way. Yes part of this is a result of inadequate Medicare funding and associated gaps that do not occur when you present to an ED. This should be a platform the newly formed Primary Health Networks take on to ensure community based service delivery is delivered.

ED crisis is defined as when the functioning of emergency department is impeded due to insufficient number of beds, services, medical staff and facilities. As the number of patients increases, the ED crisis goes on increasing as well.

According to an Australian study, ED crisis is the issue of hospitals, not the individuals and medical staff. The person in-charge of a certain hospital that is facing ED crisis should use wits to figure out the best solutions to handle ED crisis.

As ED overcrowding occurs, the facilities and number of beds available to incoming patients are reduced, the patients have to wait for longer times and ultimately it may lead to deaths of a few as well. So this crisis needs viable solutions that can be ensured soon so that ED service delivery and hospital patient flow can be maximized.

Urgent Care Clinics in Primary Care Centers - A Feasible Solution

Primary care centers provide a lot of services and medical treatments to patients and where the appointment is mandatory you can be seen quickly otherwise a wait in the waiting room is the typical protocol. The costs charged in primary care setting are much is lower as compared to ED visits and hospitals. Urgent care clinics typically only provide medical services in urgent cases and to the patients that need immediate treatment. However, it is possible f a triage system is set up in the primary care setting many medical centers could double as a urgent care clinic

As we can see, most of the emergency departments in many hospitals can’t meet the needs of the patients so thinking about building urgent care clinics in primary care centers is really a great and feasible solution.

All this needs the proper estimation and calculations of the incoming patients, the number of facilities, number of beds, the staff and others so that an estimated idea can be made when developing models to incorporate urgent care clinics.

The future needs according to the increasing population should be given due space in the facts and if future predictions are integrated in the existing facts, it will be better and easier for a certain ED’s to serve patients on need of life threatening situations with shorter wait times. Provide the Non-Emergency patients an alternative to care after being triaged at an ED Room and divert them to a local Urgent Care Clinic where they can get treated quicker and at more affordable costs to the health care system.

If a community needs ten more urgent care clinics currently to support a region of hospitals, the future needs should be included and it must be enhanced to 15 or 20 so that the next few years can be spent with comfort and ease. Western Sydney in New South Wales is a prime example of the demand out stripping resources in a public health system, whilst scope exists for expansion in the primary care market.

Yes a ambulance paramedic can differentiate between the need for emergency care and urgent care. They are trained professionals and should be able to divert to the appropriate care facility and not just deliver a patient to the hospital. The current model has flow on affects for the availability of our ambulance services also, that has been in the news recently, and therefore I will not go into details.

Other Feasible Solutions of ED Crisis

Here are some of the other solutions as well that can solve the emergency department crisis. Have a look at these:

• Improving the management of existing facilities and services as most of the time sufficient services are not best handled that lead to ED crisis
• Divert private health insurance patients to private hospitals with Emergency Departments.
• Ensuring the timely entry and exit of all patients so that the upcoming patients can be accommodated accordingly
• Empowering the patients for alternatives so that they can identify deterioration of their health condition early on
• Introduction of efficient Information Technology
• Improving better communication system between the acute and primary care sectors.

* To the readers of these articles, the purpose of many of my articles is to simply  promote thought of creating efficiency through continuous improvement of our health systems through pragmatic and achievable approaches.