Alicia RobinsonGetting sick can be bad enough....

Alicia Robinson

Getting sick can be bad enough. But these days, getting sick at the

wrong hour can add a headache to any other symptoms.

The closing of hospitals and a growing number of patients at those

that offer emergency care have led to waits of several hours, causing

some people to turn to urgent care centers to meet their health

needs.

“The things that stand out in Orange County is that there’s an

access problem for people to get in to see physicians, and there’s

also an issue of quality-control practices that exist at some

clinics,” said Robert Amster, who is opening an urgent care clinic

today in Newport Beach to offer treatment of problems that aren’t

life or death but can’t wait a few days.

Amster said he saw an unmet need in the community for faster

access to care for people with fevers and fractures, which in

emergency rooms must give way to more immediate problems such as

heart attacks or head trauma.

A number of factors have contributed to the emergency room traffic

jam, said Greg Super, medical director of emergency care at Hoag

Hospital in Newport Beach. The aging of the baby boom generation

means more people are seeking medical care, and it’s not always easy

to get an appointment within 24 hours of calling a doctor, he said.

But the biggest problem is the reduced number of hospitals

offering acute care. Over the past decade the number of hospitals

with emergency service has dropped by 15% while the number of

patients seeking emergency care has increased by 15 to 20%, Super said.

“At our hospital, for example, it’s almost always full on a daily

basis. ... It’s the worst I’ve seen and I’ve been doing this for 27

years now,” he said.

The wait for treatment of a nonlife-threatening illness or injury

in Hoag’s ER can sometimes be four hours.

Faster, with a personal touch

Many of the cases that end up in emergency rooms could be treated

elsewhere, but people with colds or sinus infections might not want

to wait a few days to see their own doctor just to get antibiotics or

other medicine.

“We [physicians] all talk about that, and there’s no question that

the reason emergency rooms are overloaded is they are getting things

that could be treated in urgent care,” said Andrew Blumberg, who is

already making a go of the urgent care business in Costa Mesa.

He opened Urgi-Kids, a pediatric urgent care center, in January

and he’s already had a good response from the community, he said.

Urgi-Kids is staffed by one of 10 pediatricians on the clinic’s

roster, and it offers care from 6 to 9 p.m. weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9

p.m. weekends and holidays. Blumberg said his clinic makes an effort

to communicate with patients’ primary care physicians, faxing them

records of clinic visits so they know what treatment their regular

patients are getting.

The niche for Amster’s clinic will be the personal touch,

something he said is lacking in the medical field today.

“We’re going to do things like answer the phones live and talk to

people, and the doctors that work are going to have a cellphone on

them at all times,” he said. “We’re not going to have this automated

voice system that you press a zillion numbers and go through an

algorithm before you get a message that says we’re too busy to

answer.”

He plans to have X-ray technicians on staff and a separate waiting

room for industrial and other occupational injuries, and his doctors

will even make house calls after clinic hours so patients can get

care between 8 a.m. and midnight every day.

Keeping patient numbers down

Urgent care centers like Blumberg’s and Amster’s won’t take the

place of emergency rooms, but they can help fill the gap between

personal physicians’ office hours and overcrowded acute care

facilities, the doctors said.

While Hoag’s patient counts are increasing by about 3 to 5% every

year, Super said, urgent care centers may have prevented that

increase from being even larger.

“Maybe without the urgent care centers, that would have been 15% a

year, so we try to encourage anyone with a noncritical,

life-threatening illness to use [them],” he said. “A vast majority of

patients with noncritical illnesses or injuries get very

satisfactory, acceptable care through the urgent care centers.”

Amster obviously sees urgent care as the wave of the future. He’s

planning to open at least six more centers in the Orange County area

in the next five years.

* ALICIA ROBINSON covers business, politics and the environment.

She may be reached at (949) 764-4330 or by e-mail at

alicia.robinson@latimes.com.