TITLE
Recommendation to request City Manager to work with the appropriate departments to report back on potential incentives and strategies to expand access to quality urgent care in neighborhoods with limited access to an acute care facility in Long Beach.
DISCUSSION
Acute care is rapid, secondary intervention, in which, a patient receives short-term treatment for a non-life-threatening injury, illness, or medical condition. Urgent care centers are an emerging sector within the healthcare field that provide patients with great convenience: affordable costs, evening and weekend hours, and shorter wait times.
The scope of urgent care services is broad, often overlapping with any other medical specialty that involves direct patient care. In fact, urgent medicine practitioners can care for any patient, regardless of age, with any complaint, much like emergency medical services. Acute care, however, differs from emergency medicine, as the former provides immediate medical attention, most commonly to lower acuity patients. Urgent care conditions are instances that require professional attention but would not result in further disability or death if the patient is not immediately treated. Such conditions can include: allergic reaction, nausea, back pain, rash, wounds/lacerations, sprains/strains, to name a few.
About 40 percent of patients who visit hospital emergency rooms have conditions that do not require high-level emergency care. Consequently, emergency departments experience overcrowding and extensive wait times. This overcrowding also has an impact on our medical emergency response times within our Fire Department. Most urgent care centers have the staffing, equipment, space, and other resources necessary to treat lower acuity patients, which could contribute to decompression of hospital emergency departments.
As we explore opportunities to enhance community-based healthcare, such as short-term intervention and delivery alternatives, we should consider...
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