Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Accepting the Presenting Complaint as the Whole Story Could Doom Your Patient and Land You in Court

The operator of a Missouri urgent care center was at the center of a tragic story in which a 1-year-old patient died—with that operator found culpable in the ensuing lawsuit and ordered to pay a $1.8 million judgment. (The jury had originally ordered the company to pay $3 million, which exceeds the state cap on malpractice suits.) The boy’s parents first brought him to a primary care clinic with symptoms attributed to pneumonia. Months later, …

Can You Maintain Staff Excellence in a Chaotic Job Market—with Disincentives to Seek Employment?

Robust unemployment benefits may be easing the burden for people who can’t find suitable work, but they’re also having the unintended consequence of making it (maybe too) comfortable for the unemployed to stay that way. Would-be candidates are even applying for jobs they have no intention of interviewing for in order to show that they’re engaged in a “bona fide job search” in compliance with requirements to maintain unemployment benefits. The effect is being felt …

One Stark Way to Assess the Impact of COVID-19 Vaccination: Most New Deaths and Hospitalizations Are in the Unvaccinated

If clinical trials and scientific data are not enough to convince every American to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, maybe a sobering new report from the Associated Press will do the trick. In short, after crunching data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the AP concluded that most new COVID-19 deaths occur in people who are not vaccinated. In May, only around 150 of the 18,000 Americans (0.8%) who died were fully vaccinated. Similarly, …

UCA Reminds Medical Societies: Urgent Care Is Fully Up to the Task at Hand

The American Hospital Association, the American College of Emergency Physicians, and the American Medical Association recently threw some serious shade at the urgent care industry. The AHA and ACEP took aim at UnitedHealthcare’s plans to review all emergency room visits among its members to assess whether they were “real” emergencies or not, and to force patients to foot the bill if it’s determined that a visit to the ED was actually nonemergent. The problem is, …

Heavy Menstrual Bleeding: Important Considerations for Adolescent Patients in the Urgent Care Setting

Urgent message: Anovulatory cycles are the most common cause of heavy menstrual bleeding (HMB) in adolescent patients. Just as with adult patients in the urgent care setting, it is most important to identify unstable patients and those with life-threatening causes for HMB. Shikha Nigam, MD, MPH and Amy Pattishall, MD Case Presentation A 14-year-old female presents with 6 weeks of menstrual bleeding. Her cycles are irregular but she generally has 4 to 6 weeks of …

Failing to Protect Your Team from Unruly Patients Puts Them—and Your Business—at Risk

A Philadelphia hospital is learning the hard way that even the possibility of failing to ensure adequate safety measures for its healthcare workers can have serious consequences for those workers, as well as the hospital’s own reputation and legal standing. Pennsylvania Hospital is being sued by a Resident who was assaulted by a psychiatric patient during an examination. The physician claims that his employer’s failure to install security cameras and to assess whether the patient …

Update: The Time to Get Onboard with New OSHA COVID-19 Requirements Is Now

Recently, we told you about an emergency temporary standard (ETS) issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to ensure the safety of healthcare workers—including your urgent care team—in the COVID-19 era. Since then, the ETS has been published in the Federal Register and the date for requiring compliance has been set at July 5. As a reminder the ETS mandates that: You conduct a hazard assessment and have a written plan to mitigate virus …

Does More Work for Pharmacists Equate to Less Safety for Urgent Care Patients?

The retail drugstore industry has worked hard to market itself as a one-stop destination for their customers’ healthcare needs, offering everything from strep tests to flu shots just steps away from the magazine rack and the candy aisle. Needless to say, they leave out the part about urgent care centers offering the same services in addition to x-rays, sutures, and many other, higher-acuity services in a purely clinical setting. This is not to say that …

The More We Know About the COVID-19 Delta Variant, the More Urgent Vaccination Becomes

Even with caseloads remaining low in much of the U.S. and states continuing to relax protective restrictions, two realities remain inescapable as the COVID-19 pandemic continues: 1) The Delta variant is associated with approximately double the risk of hospitalization compared with the Alpha variant, per a research letter just published by The Lancet and 2) persistent refusal by residents of certain states puts us all at risk for the Delta variant to become the dominant …

Seasons Change—and so Should Your Public Outreach Campaigns

People have been shut out of so many activities for so long that they may not be aware of how prepared (or unprepared) they are for minor emergencies. Fortunately, viewers of WFMY in Greensboro, NC had the chance to be reminded of items that are essential for a summer first aid kit by Philip Lamptey, MD, medical director of Cone Health’s Urgent Care Division recently. Dr. Lamptey appeared live on one of the station’s news …