City leaders got a sneak peek at Jacksonville’s newest healthcare facility Wednesday afternoon.
The Jacksonville Area Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon cutting for the new Memorial Care Urgent Care Clinic in the Lincoln Square Shopping Center on West Morton Avenue.
The clinic officially opens for walk-in-only patients this Sunday. Incoming President and CEO of Jacksonville Memorial Hospital Trevor Huffman says the new urgent care clinic will fill a long-standing need in the Jacksonville area.
“It’s exciting, I mean this is something I think that our community has waited for for a long time, and it’s something that we have needed to meet a lot of our needs. It’s just a great example of the ongoing commitment that we have in meeting the needs of our community, so I’m very excited for it opening up.”
The new clinic located at 901 West Morton Avenue is Memorial Health’s seventh urgent care facility. The 5,000 square foot space features eight patient rooms, a procedure room as well as onsite laboratory and x-ray imaging services.
Jay Roszhart, President of the Memorial Health Ambulatory Group says he is very excited to have urgent care in Jacksonville, not just for the general public, but for Memorial Health’s own employees as well.
“We have almost nine thousand colleagues across Memorial Health and quite a few of them live in the Jacksonville area, and they wanted access to urgent care services just like the regular community did. As we were building this and putting it together people were driving past on Morton and saying, oh it’s going to be another urgent care- it’s going to be a Memorial Urgent Care, and we had a ton of calls.
A ton of calls from people wanting to know when it is going to be open and when we are going to be able to use it. Because depending on your payer and your insurance, the closest one you could have potentially gone to would have been either Chatham or Koke Mill to get those urgent care services which are now going to be available right here in Jacksonville.”
One of those employees is the Director of Urgent Care facilities for Memorial Health, Anna Richie who is from the Waverly/New Berlin area. Richie says she’s excited to help offer high-quality care for minor illnesses and injuries. She though, that urgent care is not a replacement for having a primary care physician.
“We definitely want to encourage primary care, and especially for high blood pressure and kind of those chronic conditions, we really want to encourage making sure everyone has a primary care physician for those reasons. And if we see someone who doesn’t have a primary care physician we’re going to look and explore and see if we can help them get a primary care physician.
So we really are for those acute injuries, especially evenings and weekends when you can’t get into your primary care providers. We don’t want to bottleneck or back up the emergency department with those kinds of small, acute, minor injuries. Let’s save the ER for those major problems and we will take care of those minor things.”
Patients can use the free Memorial Health app to see how many patients are waiting in line at the clinic and even save a spot in line before they leave their homes.
Roszhart says the Memorial Urgent Care Clinic will help patients who need healthcare right away but not urgent enough to warrant waiting in the emergency room. “Typically our urgent cares are here to do more of the type of care that you wouldn’t necessarily go to the emergency room for. We can do basic lacerations, if you have a broken bone you can have an x-ray and get it set here.
Basic sick visits if you can’t get into your doctor and you think you have a cold or have Covid or strep, something like that, we can do those tests here. So any of those things that you know you want to get care and you want to get it soon, but you’re just not sure it really is a true emergency that you need to go to the hospital for.”
Beginning this Sunday, the Memorial Urgent Care Clinic in Jacksonville will be open for walk-in patients from 8 am to 8 pm seven days a week.