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Urgent care is becoming a growth industry
Prime Care's new office in Spotsylvania is the region's latest urgent-care clinic
Date published: 1/23/2009 By Jim Hall YOUR HEAD IS Where are you going to turn to for help? Beyond the obvious choices of chicken soup and a call to Mom, chances are you're driving to one of the dozen or so urgent-care clinics that have popped up, or soon will, in the Fredericksburg area. Among them is Prime Care, an urgent-care clinic in Spotsylvania County. It opened a second office on Jan. 14 in the Courtland Family Medical Center. That's a new medical-office building at the intersection of Courthouse Road and Smith Station Road. The clinic joins the original Prime Care office on Salem Church Road, which opened in 2004. Both Prime Cares are owned by Drs. Michael Goeden, Joseph Marietta and Clifton Sheets, three former emergency-room doctors at Mary Washington Hospital. Sheets and Dr. Karl Lagally will be the physician providers at the new location. Like other urgent-care clinics in the area, Prime Care features extended hours and electronic medical records and does not require appointments. Walk-in clinics also become the medical home for many families. "We're convinced this is a good model," Goeden said. Prime Care's new office has X-ray capability and seven patient-exam rooms. LabCorp, a national testing company, leases space within the clinic to provide laboratory services. Prime Care's office is the third urgent-care company to open offices here in recent months. MediCorp Health System opened the first of three planned NextCare clinics in June on State Route 3. A second NextCare opened on White Oak Road in Stafford County last week, and a third will open in early March Drugstore chain CVS opened one of its MinuteClinics inside its store on Tidewater Trail in Spotsylvania Oct. 1. On the horizon is Richmond-based Patient First, which operates 25 primary- and urgent-care centers in Virginia, Maryland and Washington. It will make its first foray into this area in Central Park, where it plans to open Jim Hall: 540/374-5433 Cathy Jett: 540/374-5407
Read more stories about Fredericksburg Date published: 1/23/2009
not a solution
(posted by
fredness
, Jan. 23, 2009 7:40 am)
The burgeoning growth of walk in clinics, minute clinics, doc in a boxes are not a solution. They are a symptom of the problem, which is the dearth of primary care providers.
Over reliance on this system will lead to further fragmentation of medical care.I think these clinics play an important role in the gross overprescription of antibiotics and the subsequent prevalence of drug resistant bacteria in this country . ( drugs prescribed for "minor illnesses" probably don't need to be prescribed at all)
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