People with pressing health care needs in Lewis County will soon have more options when Valley View Health Center opens its new urgent care center in Centralia this December.

    The opening date is tentatively set for Dec.  1, according to Steven Clark, executive director of Valley View.

    The center will be located at 1800 Cooks Hill Road, Suite F, where the hospital’s cancer services were located before moving to the new cancer center across the street. Providence Centralia Hospital has donated the building on its campus for the urgent care project.

    “We’re all very excited,” Clark said.

    Plans for an urgent care center have been in the works for years, he said. When Valley View first formed five years ago, the board was aware of a growing problem with Providence’s overburdened emergency department.

    The hospital’s emergency department sees on average about 35,000 patients per year, or about 100 patients per day, according to Donna Frerichs, director of the emergency department.

    “And a significant percent of those patients would be best treated in a clinic situation,” she said.

    The hospital does offer a service they call Fast Track, from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m., which helps with patients who come in for urgent care needs rather than emergencies, she said.

    But when people come to the emergency department with what Frerichs calls clinic-type issues, such as tooth pain or chronic illness, outside of those Fast Track hours, emergency personnel are pulled from emergency care to serve them.

    “So we have emergency department resources being used on non-emergency conditions,” she said. “The goal, obviously, is to keep our resources for emergencies, but we’re obligated by law to see everyone who comes in. It would be great if there were resources in the community for those urgent care patients instead.”

    This is where the Valley View urgent care center hopes to step in. Signs will be posted in the emergency department and literature will be available announcing the new center.

    “We want people to know that if they feel they have an emergency they can come to us,” said Dennis Mesaros, chief operating officer at Providence Centralia Hospital. “But we will be helping to educate our community and promoting the urgent care center in collaboration with Valley View.”

    Valley View Health Center is a not-for-profit corporation that started in 2004, aimed at providing low-cost medical and dental care to low-income and under-insured people in the county.

    More than 7,000 people received services through the center’s five locations in the county last year, and over 3,000 obtained dental care, according to the center’s 2008 annual report.

    Providing urgent care to these same low-income or under-insured people will be the focus of the urgent care center, said Clark, Valley View’s executive director.

    The center will start out with two providers and is aiming at being open seven days per week, he said. The center will accept all forms of insurance and will even work with those who are uninsured.

    “We’re hoping that people will understand that if they go to the emergency room, they’ll have a two to three or more hour wait,” Clark said. “If they come to us, they’ll be seen faster. And it will save them and the emergency department a significant amount of money.”

    But the service will not end there, Clark said. Another important step that staff at the center will provide is to help each patient get established with a primary care provider in the community.

    “We’re going to be working together with all health care providers in the county,” Clark said. “We’ll be calling them and asking whether they can take a new patient when we have someone in need of a regular doctor come into the center.”

    This step, important to both Clark and Providence’s chief operating officer Mesaros, should begin to help eliminate the vast number of patients who use the hospital’s emergency department as a primary care provider.

    “It’s really been a long-standing problem,” Mesaros said. “The emergency department is not equipped to provide the appropriate level of care that patients need for chronic, routine, preventative care.”

    And the service will benefit community members in an obvious way. There are currently very few options for people who need urgent care in this county during evening, weekend or holiday hours.

    Valley View’s urgent care center will give them somewhere to go.

Urgent Care in Lewis County

    These clinics accept walk-in patients and are open during the times listed. They accept “most types” of insurance, and some will take credit cards. There are also several clinics in the county that offer evening and weekend hours, but they are not available on a walk-in basis.

Woodland Urgent Care

1299 Bishop Road, Chehalis

748-9822

Hours:

Weekdays 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Weekends and holidays

5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Pediatric After-Hours Clinic

Providence Centralia Hospital

914 S. Scheuber Road, Centralia

330-8526

Hours:

Open daily from 6 p.m.

to 9 p.m.