As the 2018–19 influenza season peaks in the United States, public health officials and academic experts are pleading with patients to stay away from the emergency room if they have flu symptoms—and instead head to their nearest urgent care center. The Rhode Island Department of Health, for one, issued a statement singling out urgent care as the ideal setting for flu testing and treatment, to avoid both long waits and high costs in the ED …
About JUCM POTENTIAL TOPICS PUBLICATION ETHICS & STANDARDS PEER REVIEW POLICIES EDITORIAL POLICIES PRE-SUBMISSION CHECKLIST WHAT TO EXPECT AFTER SUBMISSION CORRECTIONS AND RETRACTIONS COPYRIGHT POLICY ADVERTISING POLICIES ARCHIVING POLICY About JUCM The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine welcomes original manuscripts covering practical clinical and practice management topics for our readers―the world’s urgent care clinicians and leaders. Clinical manuscripts submitted for publication in JUCM should report the results of original research, explore clinical or practice management topics from …
Check the Temps: A Timely Throwback Key points: Peripheral temperatures (ie, temporal, tympanic, oral, and axillary) are inaccurate and cannot reliably exclude the presence of fever. If absolute certainty regarding febrile status is critical (eg, neonates, immunosuppressed patients), a (gentle) rectal temperature is the preferred method of temperature acquisition in the urgent care setting. For all others, a tympanic temperature reading <37.5°C appears to best exclude true fever with reasonable certainty. Finally, all this comes …
Public health officials in numerous states, most notably California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are reporting significant flu activity—some exceeding even last year’s severe flu season. California has seen a relatively high number of deaths (42) for this point in the season. Roughly half of those have Top of Formoccurred in the elderly. Flu has been called “widespread” in New Jersey, to the extent that some hospitals there are imposing restrictions on people visiting hospitals. AtlantiCare …
Cases of vaccine-preventable diseases continue to pile up across the country, with Oregon and Washington being the latest states to report outbreaks of measles. One of the affected children in Washington, whose immunization status was unknown, was diagnosed at an urgent care center in Vancouver in late December. Public health officials in both states are publicizing locations where patients with measles visited in order to encourage people they may have come in contact with to …
Urgent message: Urgent care providers often see acute public health emergencies due to easy patient accessibility. It is important to identify communicable disease rapidly to control any risk of a community outbreak. This article will focus on mumps, measles and varicella (chickenpox). Carmen N. Burrell, DO, Melinda J. Sharon, MPH, and Megan Kessell, BA In recent years, outbreaks of uncommon infectious diseases have occurred in schools and communities, due to increasing travel exposures, decreasing vaccination …
Urgent message: Cat scratch disease caused by the bacteria Bartonella henselae typically presents as isolated lymphadenopathy in the region draining the inoculation site (cat scratch or saliva), as well as systemic symptoms such as a fever and malaise. In otherwise healthy people, oculoglandular symptoms are occasionally seen as a complicated presentation. CSD should be included in the differential diagnosis of these symptoms. Joseph V.M. Kelly, MD, MBA, Nicholas Baltera OMS I, and Ronald Dvorkin, MD, …
Every October (or earlier), the call goes up that it’s time for patients to get their annual flu shot. Urgent care providers are inundated with messages from all corners of healthcare, pleading with them to vaccinate as many people as time and patient preference allows. Advances in artificial intelligence could put a stop to that at some point, however. No, it can’t program patients to follow your advice by getting immunized. Rather, as noted in …
Despite your best efforts—and those of your colleagues, employers, and the entire U.S. healthcare system—and the highest flu-related death toll in decades last year, many adults have no intention of getting a flu shot this year, according to data just released by NORC (formerly known as the National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago. Nearly 41% of adults surveyed hadn’t been immunized as of mid-November and said they weren’t planning to this year. …
Patients who heed your advice to get a flu shot and take common-sense measures to avoid spreading germs—regular, effective handwashing; cleaning common-use surfaces; staying home when they’re sick—are less likely to get the flu. That’s a given. What’s less clear in the midst of any flu season is how many of them do so (and at what point), and how effective the vaccine is for those who do receive it. The Centers for Disease Control …
