If you are reading this, you should be a member of UCA. No cheating…keep reading.
The Urgent Care Association (UCA) is your representative organization. Whether you are a practice administrator, biller, owner, physician, physician assistant, or nurse practitioner, UCA is doing the heavy lifting on your behalf to build the foundation of this industry and discipline.
Consider the following:
- UCA was founded six years ago with the vision to be the catalyst for the recognition of urgent care as an essential part of the healthcare system.
With a singular focus—and despite a mountain of obstacles—UCA has supported initiatives which have literally defined this discipline and established the industry as a major player in the delivery of acute care and occupational services to over 100 million patients annually.
- UCA was the first body to define the core competencies of the discipline of urgent care medicine. These competencies were used to design the first and only clinical fellowships, the first and only peer-reviewed journal, and hours of continuing education opportunities.
- UCA is the organization that funded the first and only national sampling frame in urgent care, identifying over 8,000 urgent cares nationwide. This was quickly followed by the first and only benchmarking study in the industry, identifying key services and practice parameters.
Combined, these two studies created an urgent care framework which has given voice and definition to our role in healthcare.
- UCA quickly followed with the formation of an Urgent Care Certification process that allows your center to uniquely identify your urgent care services. UCA’s partnership with the Joint Commission brought representation to the development of accreditation standards for urgent care centers and national recognition of our unique services.
- UCA’s committees are hard at work creating new opportunities for urgent care. Legislative, public awareness, academic, quality, and benchmarking initiatives are ongoing to support the growth and evolution of our discipline and the entire urgent care industry.
- UCA is over 3,200 members strong as of this writing. Membership stretches across the country and around the globe, including Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Canada, Mexico, and Hungary.
UCA’s commitment to its mission and vision is a commitment to its members, and a commitment to the industry at large. The mission and vision represent a promise to you. A promise of representation, a promise of growth and development, a promise of academic achievement and quality improvement.
Without your support, however, it will be impossible to deliver on those promises, and, on behalf of all of us practicing in urgent care, we cannot let that happen. To fulfill our commitment to our mission and vision, we must continually grow and evolve.
Membership in UCA is the single most important ingredient in support of this end.
If you are reading this journal, which is published by virtue of a partnership between UCA and Braveheart Publishing, you are benefiting from the work of UCA, so please support the organization that is working hard in support of all of us.
Go to www.ucaoa.org for more information.
Lee A. Resnick, MD
Editor-in-Chief
JUCM, The Journal of Urgent Care Medicine
