Making sense of urgent care, emergency services

While playing a weekend game of driveway hoops, you roll your ankle and a sharp pain rockets up your leg. In a few moments, your throbbing ankle has begun to swell and you figure it's badly sprained, possibly broken.

Your family doctor suggests you go to an emergency room. Upon arriving, you're told the wait may be up to five hours.

With the continuous closures of emergency rooms across the United States and the increase in ER visits by people seeking regular medical care, wait times in emergency rooms continues to rise.

According to a report released last year by the Centers for Disease Control, visits to emergency rooms increased by 26 percent between 1993 and 2003. More than 113 million people made trips to the ER in 2003.

In addition, more than 12 percent of the nation's hospitals closed their emergency room doors during those 10 years.

Ventura County saw the closures of both Santa Paula Memorial Hospital and the Westlake Village Medical Center. Los Angeles County hospitals were hit especially hard, closing 10 of 23 emergency rooms over the past decade.

Because there are only seven acute care hospitals in Ventura County with emergency rooms, in many cases the wait time can be lengthy. Later this month, St. John's Pleasant Valley Hospital will break ground to expand its emergency room from eight to 14 beds, hospital officials said.

For most non-life threatening injuries, though, an urgent care center can offer basically the same treatment as an emergency room, generally in half the time.

"Urgent care can take care of more minor urgent needs," said Dr. Christina Jones, a physician with Community Memorial Hospital's Center for Family Health in Camarillo. "If someone is having chest pains, they should be in the hospital...but there's a number of sicknesses we can deal with right here."

Emergency Rooms

Call 911 if you have chest pain or difficulty breathing. The two symptoms may be signs of heart problems, a severe allergic reaction, asthma or pneumonia.

Patients should also call 911 immediately if there are signs of a stroke. Symptoms may include numbness in any extremity.

In addition, patients suffering from severe stomach pain should call 911.

It's recommended that patients call an ambulance because immediate medical care while enroute to the hospital may be necessary. And ambulances will only take patients to an emergency room, not an urgent care center.

Serious injuries such as a bad burn, an amputation, severe head trauma, a complicated fracture or electrical shock should be treated in an emergency room, as well.

ER attention also is required if someone shows an altered mental state, has seizures or is unconscious. An ER visit also is recommended if poison is ingested.

Legally, emergency rooms cannot deny anyone care and emergency room staff cannot ask for type of payment before medical services are performed.

All of the emergency room doctors at St. John's Pleasant Valley Hospital are either board certified in ER medicine or have extensive post-graduate training in emergency services, said Dr. H. Allen Hooper, medical director for St. John's Regional and St. John's Pleasant Valley emergency rooms.

Pleasant Valley Hospital has eight physicians in its emergency room rotation with a support staff of four ER nurses per shift, Hooper said.

Pleasant Valley sees about 18,000 patients in its emergency room per year, Hooper said.

Hooper said wait times for the hospital's ER can be anywhere from no time at all to several hours, and severely injured patients are treated first.

But emergency rooms are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Urgent Care

By law, urgent care facilities must have oxygen, a defibrillator, and X-ray and laboratory capabilities. Like emergency rooms, urgent care centers treat patients on an as-needed basis. Wait times, however, for urgent care centers are typically shorter.

Urgent care centers can handle a myriad of non-life threatening problems such as a cough, fever, vomiting, sore throat, diarrhea, earache, insect/snake bites and minor cuts requiring stitches.

In addition, urgent care centers treat anything from a minor burn to a simple fracture, along with removing moles and treating infected toenails.

Most urgent care centers will also provide drug screening, give travel immunizations and perform school and work physicals.

Camarillo has two urgent care centers. The older of the two, Channel Islands Urgent Care & Family Practice on Pickwick Drive, has been in the area for five years. Dr. Paul Morin, the center's owner, works with two nurses to see about 9,000 patients a year, according to Teresa Tibbetts, the center's office manager.

Like many urgent care centers, Channel Islands accepts most major healthcare insurance plans, including Medicare. They do not accept Medi-Cal.

The center is open Monday through Friday 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Appointments and walk-in patients are accepted.

Tibbetts said most patients find very short wait times at Channel Islands. "If you've waited 20 minutes here, you've waited a long (time)," Tibbetts said.

Operated by Ventura-based Community Memorial Hospital, the CMH Center for Family Health on Arneill Road opened in 2003 and added an urgent care component in June last year.

Jones shares duties in the urgent care center with Dr. Hani Fouad and a medical staff that includes two nurses. Both Jones and Fouad are family practitioners.

The CMH Center for Family Health also offers medical services for internal medicine, cardiology, obstetrics/gynecology and dermatology.

According to Dr. Richard Reisman, CMH's medical director, the Camarillo center treats about 1,400 patients a month.

The CMH urgent care center is open Monday through Saturday 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and accepts appointments and walk-in patients. The family practice side of the center is open Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Wherever you seek care, bring a list of all current medications, as well as a list of any medications you're allergic to.

In the midst of a medical emergency, the last thing anyone wants to do is take time to look up the number of a nearby medical center. To that end, here is the contact information for the two urgent care centers and the emergency room serving Camarillo.

Urgent Care Centers

+CMH Center for Family Health 422-B Arneill Road Camarillo, CA 93010 (805) 482-1282

Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

+Channel Islands Urgent Care & Family Practice  2103 Pickwick Drive Camarillo,CA93010 (805) 484-7448

Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Emergency Room

+St. John's Pleasant Valley Hospital 2309 Antonio Ave. Camarillo, CA 93010 (805) 389-5632

Open seven days a week, 24 hours a day Acorn Bits