When your child is sick or hurt, your brain can go into panic mode. Where to go? Urgent care, the ER, your primary care physician? Here’s generally what you need to know beforehand so you’ll know what to do. (Having an action plan is great for beating the panic back; when in doubt, don’t hesitate to pick up the phone.)
Emergency room
“The ER is for things you’re extremely worried about,” says Dr. Timothy Korber, an emergency medicine physician at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital. Emergency rooms can handle the most serious cases and have all the resources of a large hospital.
When something really gnarly happens, our first instinct can be to rush to the ER, but there are actually a lot of conditions that can be handled elsewhere.
“The ER is for patients experiencing life-threatening emergencies such as crushing chest pain, gasping for air, loss of consciousness or slurred speech,” says Dr. Adam Solomon, chief medical officer for the MemorialCare Medical Foundation.
Other reasons to hit the ER? “If you need sedation, if you need very complex sutures, if you need to get a specialist. But those are actually very rare instances,” says Dr. Steven Abelowitz, medical director and president of Coastal Kids Pediatric Medical Group.
Abelowitz recommends that if there’s a truly life-threatening emergency, parents call 911. “If any situation needs you to go to the ER right away, you don’t want to in a car driving with a child. It’s too dangerous.”
Other reasons not to rush to the ER? You’ll be spending lots of time cooling your heels in the waiting room if your child’s condition is less life-threatening than the other patients who happen to be there. It can expose your child (and you) to other people with potentially infectious diseases. And it can be much more expensive that a trip to the urgent care or your regular doctor.
Urgent care
Urgent care is useful as an after-hours option when your child gets injured or sick, but the situation isn’t life-threatening. Urgent care works for things like a sprained ankle on Sunday afternoon, a UTI that cannot wait or a minor burn on a Tuesday night.
For folks who don’t have a primary care physician, urgent care is also a way to get in to see someone fast. However, they don’t offer the kind of personalized care and follow up that a pediatrician would.
Primary care physician
Besides well checks, sport physicals, vaccinations and the like, your primary care physician is equipped to take on a lot more than you might think.
“Basically, we can take care of anything that is not life-threatening,” says Abelowitz. At Coastal Kids they can handle a wide range of maladies including sprains, lacerations, concussions, skin infections, rashes, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, ear and throat infections, croup, pneumonia, bronchitis and even animal bites. “There’s nothing that the urgent care can do that we can’t do,” says Abelowitz.
Just worried about heading to the doctor’s office?
Your preferred care provider may have options. At Coastal Kids, they’re taking extra care to separate sick and well patients.
In some of their offices, they see sick patients in the morning, well ones in the afternoon, and in other locations, there are completely separate offices for sick and well patients.
Like Coastal, many are offering TeleMed appointments, where you and your child can chat with your doctor over video about symptoms. These can take the place of an in-person visit unless it’s a situation that requires hand-on care, like if the doctor needs to listen to a child’s lungs, peer inside a throat, or work on an injury.
And at Coastal Kids, they’ve even started seeing patients in their cars, like old time drive-in restaurant but with no milkshakes but more stethoscopes.
Jill Hamilton is the mother of two teenage girls and lives in Long Beach. Email her at jill.longbeach@yahoo.com.
Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in the June 2020 issue of OC Family.
"urgent" - Google News
June 05, 2020 at 07:51AM
https://ift.tt/30bidl6
ER, urgent care or regular doctor — where should I take my child? - OCRegister
"urgent" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2ya063o
https://ift.tt/3d7MC6X
urgent
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "ER, urgent care or regular doctor — where should I take my child? - OCRegister"
Post a Comment