Expansion
Hospital to Open Up Urgent Care Center Relieving Danville Regional
By Susan Elzey

Cathy Shelton puts the finishing touches on Danville's new urgent care clinic.

Danville Regional Medical Center is taking another step to treat patients effectively while reducing the wait time at the emergency room.

As hospital CEO Art Doloresco promised in September, an urgent care center will open soon to relieve the emergency room from taking care of non-emergency complaints. It will be located on the first floor across the street from the hospital in the Professional Building, which is located at 201 S. Main St.

Although it has not been officially named yet and an opening date has not been firmly set, Cathy Shelton, Director of Danville Physician Practice, is interviewing and hiring staff for the clinic.

“I have hired a nurse practitioner, and I’m at the interviewing point to hire a physician,” Shelton said Thursday.

The nurse practitioner will be Jonathan Murugasan, who has most recently been with University of Virginia Health Services Foundation.

Murugasan has “years of experience” as a registered nurse before returning to school and earning his masters of nursing through Old Dominion University, Shelton said.

Other support staff to be hired will include a receptionist, a nurse and a radiology/ lab technician.

The clinic will initially be open 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday and 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

“The 5 p.m. opening will eliminate the bottleneck at the Emergency Department, and then we will backfill the schedule as things run smoothly,” Shelton said.

The hospital hopes to have the clinic open 12 hours a day by the summer and will serve insured, self-paying and Medicaid patients.

Initially, signs in the Emergency Department will make patients aware of the availability of a place to go for non-emergency complaints.

Shelton said that regulations with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act make it “sticky” for the department to refer patients to another facility.

“If someone shows up, we have to treat them,” she said. “Sending patients across the street could be seen as turning people away.”

In the future, the Emergency Department might have initial medical screening by a nurse practitioner to refer patients to the urgent care clinic, but signs will initially let them know that they could probably be seen faster across the street, Shelton said.

“The clinic will treat complaints such as lacerations, sore throats, fevers and gastro-intestinal bugs,” she said. “Initially, when Art (Doloresco) started talking about this, he wanted to push 10,000 patients a year there.”

Approximately one-third of the 36,000 visits to Danville Regional’s Emergency Department last year were for non-emergency complaints, according to a hospital news release.

Shelton said the hospital plans a “soft,” unadvertised opening so they can “iron out the kinks.”

In the 90s, Danville Regional had a non-urgent care facility called MedExpress in a modular building across the street from the hospital. This care was later moved to the Emergency Department and became FastTrack, which still is an option for non-emergency care, according to Tamara Freeman, department director.

“One of the main reasons MedExpress closed was because there was one group of physicians and nurses staffing both Med- Express and the ED,” Shelton said.

MedExpress also had limited resources for testing, but the new clinic will have its own staff and X-ray and laboratory facilities.

“We also have signed a letter of intent to build a facility in Brosville,” Shelton said. “It will be a hybrid clinic, which will be a family practice clinic during the day and have extended hours for urgent care at night.”

She said the Brosville clinic will differ from the urgent care center in Danville because patients in Danville will be told to see their family doctor for a follow-up, while in Brosville, patients will be able to return and see the family practitioners for follow-up care.

For now, the clinic will share space with the Occupational Health clinic and have probably five examination rooms and an X-ray room.