Practice Management
The past year has brought nonstop changes in how Americans live their daily lives. What used to be typical behavior became foolhardy. People stopped going to doctors for nonemergent complaints to a large extent, with urgent care suffering downturns in patient volume (temporarily, though some practices are still trying to catch up). Bearing that in mind, the Urgent Care Association, of which JUCM is the official publication, in the interest of full disclosure, has adapted …
Read More
As of this writing, nearly 17% of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. Millions more have received at least one of the two doses they’ll need for full protection or are waiting for full protection to “kick in.” All told at this point, roughly 150 million Americans have some degree of protection. There are probably nearly that many who have a lot of questions about what they should or shouldn’t …
Read More
What on the surface could appear to be good news may actually be obscuring a clearer picture of how the pandemic is affecting children in an unexpected way. Reports of suspected child abuse have dropped—dramatically—over the past year or so, according to an article from the Associated Press. At the same time, however, the AP’s review of records in Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas indicate that child deaths due to suspected maltreatment …
Read More
Urgent message: This is the urgent message about a truly urgent case presentation concerning a pediatric patient in an urgent care center. Diana Sofia Villacis Nunez, MD; Amit Thakral, MD, MBA; and Pareen Shah, MD CASE PRESENTATION A 12-year-old previously healthy female presents with a 5-day history of lower extremity rash and low-grade fever (100.6°F). A month earlier, she had a self-resolving viral upper respiratory infection. The rash is described as mildly pruritic, dark red …
Read More
The world celebrated the approval of multiple vaccines against the COVID-19 virus. Almost simultaneously to that, however, news was emerging concerning variants to the virus, first in London and South Africa, but eventually here in the U.S., as well. Some are more transmissible, and just as deadly. Urgent care patients are naturally curious about whether the currently available vaccines offer protection against them. The answer is an unsatisfying “that depends.” According to research published in …
Read More
The evening news is packed with feel-good stories on how many millions of Americans have been and continue to get vaccinated against COVID-19. And those stories are true—but they don’t paint the full picture. Too many Americans (including, anecdotally, healthcare workers) are skeptical of the vaccine or mistakenly believe that we’re on the cusp of herd immunity “so, what’s the point?” Here’s the point: According to modeling by the Imperial College of London’s COVID-19 Response …
Read More
Cases of COVID-19 have been up (way up, at times), they’ve plateaued, and they’ve gone down. Then up and down again. At no time, however, has a federal health official employed a word as dramatic as “doom” to describe the prospects of what comes next—until this week. Rochelle Walensky, MD, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said pointblank that the United States is looking at “impending doom” as the current increase in …
Read More
It looks like millions of cases were missing from the number of U.S. COVID-19 infections reported through September 2020, according to data just published in JAMA Network Open. The problem seems to have been a lack of understanding of how prevalent the virus could be in asymptomatic patients. Blood samples from 61,910 adults who were “well” at the time they applied for life insurance showed a 6.6% positivity rate. Extrapolating that rate to the entire …
Read More
Perhaps counterintuitively, there have been widespread reports of healthcare workers refusing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, putting themselves, those around them, and your business at risk. Their choice is likely founded on the same baseless fears that keep too many members of the public away—mainly, that the speed at which the vaccines were studied and approved means they’re unproven or could be dangerous. Incidence of serious side effects has not proven to be any higher …
Read More
Fluctuating shifts, a fast-paced work environment, and generally high stress brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic can conspire to make sleepless nights an all-too-common occurrence for urgent care professionals. There could be much higher consequences than next-day sluggishness and bags under your eyes, though. New research just published by BMJ Nutrition, Prevention, and Health reveals that clinicians who are frequently exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and who experience difficulty sleeping at night or poor sleep continuity, or …
Read More