If testing activities in China are any indication—and can be believed—then widespread screening will be essential to really opening up businesses and culture in the U.S. Officials in Wuhan, where the pandemic really started to take off, say they’ve tested nearly 7 million people, turning up just 206 who were found to have asymptomatic COVID-19; clearly, that’s below the threshold of cases that would prohibit easing social distancing restrictions. This could be a prime opportunity for urgent care to contribute, helping to save lives, jobs, and its own future. The challenge is to make decision makers more aware of our capabilities than they apparently have been the past few months. Inexplicably, urgent care centers have been mostly overlooked by public officials and business leaders implementing testing procedures. An article published online by Bloomberg Law goes as far as to call urgent care centers “one logical option that hasn’t been tapped” in the nation’s fight against the pandemic. It quotes Urgent Care Association figures indicating that urgent care as a whole has the capacity to do half a million tests every day. While lobbying efforts are ongoing by UCA, and urgent care stakeholders are banging the drum to raise awareness, it will be up to individual operators to ensure the communities they serve are aware of their capabilities. Consider taking the following steps to ensure you’re doing your part to advance your own cause and move the industry forward:
- Call or write to your local and state health departments to encourage them to include urgent care centers among the facilities they direct patients to in order to be tested.
- Advertise your capacity to screen patients safely. Velocity Urgent Care CEO Alan Ayers, who is also senior editor for practice management content of JUCM, put his company’s message on billboards and in television ads for the first time ever. “There are populations we needed to reach and we were concerned we couldn’t reach them other ways,” Ayers notes in the Bloomberg Law piece.
- If you offer occupational medicine services, let your clients know that you can help them ensure a safe workplace by testing employees as needed.