Urgent care without the wait: emergency room alternatives arrived in Alaska in the 1980s and continue strong.

• Author: West, Gail

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Have you sliced your finger recently and wondered whether you should go to the emergency room to have it stitched closed? Had a migraine and had your doctor's office tell you they can give you an appointment next week? Have you postponed finding a family doctor only to find that your children's immunization records are due at school? All feasible scenarios, and those people face every day.

Where do you go when these things happen? In the more populated centers of Alaska, such as Anchorage, Fairbanks and Mat-Su, you have choices.

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With general hospitals, there are also emergency rooms, and emergency rooms take all patients. The trade off, though, is that emergency rooms take all patients--which means that everyone can come into the emergency room, whether for major or minor emergencies. That may mean that you, who might be nursing a sprained ankle, may wait while the emergency room medical staff rush someone seriously injured in an automobile accident past you and into immediate care.

No, you wouldn't change the emergency room's priorities. But you might want to eliminate that long stint waiting for treatment for yourself.

ORIGINS

America's original urgent care centers opened their doors in the 1970s, and have been offering unscheduled, walk-in care for routine and non-life-threatening medical injuries and illnesses for more than 30 years. Many of these centers have been opened by physicians who saw the need for convenient access to unscheduled medical care, and others have been opened by hospital systems seeking new access to patients.

At urgent care centers, patients need make no appointment and need no referrals. Urgent care centers take most insurance plans, and deal with both urgent and non-urgent medical issues. Medical staff at these centers sees patients who need to be seen quickly by a physician, but can't get to their family doctor immediately. They see patients after normal office hours and on holidays, and they see patients who don't have family doctors.

In Alaska, urgent care centers began to offer their services in the 1980s--Anchorage's First Care and Wasilla's AIC Urgent Care both opened in 1985. AIC was sold to Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in 1989, and became a department of the hospital, according to Linda Olson, director of Urgent Care and Infusion Therapy.

"The hospital board decided to make the urgent care center a part of the hospital so we could work more closely with the...