Medical facilities in Nevada are increasingly adapting to accommodate patients’ diverse health care needs, with a strong focus on providing patients with improved access to treatment.
These efforts include ensuring late-night and weekend care for patients who can experience health issues outside normal office hours. This has long remained a high concern for Southern Nevada families, as children often have limited health care options during evening and nighttime hours, when their primary pediatric providers’ offices are typically closed.
Families have often encountered a lack of alternative health care options for children late at night and on weekends, with many parents forced to choose between deferring care until their primary care provider is available, or taking children to the emergency room and incurring higher costs and longer wait times due to the escalation in level of care.
Good Night Pediatrics, an urgent care facility in Henderson, seeks to address this gap in health care with an innovative model of delivering care. The facility specializes in providing services for children and teenagers during evening and nighttime hours, with the clinic open from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. 365 days of the year. The clinic’s unique business model, the only one of its kind in the Las Vegas Valley, aims to provide a convenient alternative to the ER when children experience health issues at night, allowing children to see a pediatric specialist and avoid undue escalation and unnecessary ER visits. Pediatricians at the facility can treat a wide range of non-emergency illnesses and injuries, including strep, asthma issues, flu symptoms, minor cuts and broken bones, earaches, fevers and more. In addition, the clinic provides sports physicals for students. The availability of after-hours pediatric services in a non-emergency environment reduces wait time and cost of care for both families and insurance providers, while providing high-quality pediatric care to patients.
The availability of all-night care for children serves as a valuable resource in Las Vegas, where many parents and guardians work late shifts in the hospitality and entertainment industries. Families with unique schedules might otherwise face challenges with obtaining high quality and cost effective health care services for children.
The all-night pediatric urgent care model might also help reduce pressure on Southern Nevada’s emergency rooms by providing a helpful late-night care option for children’s non-emergency health issues. In 2012, 18 percent of children under the age of 18 in the U.S. visited the emergency room at least once that year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Approximately 75 percent of children’s ER visits that year occurred at night or on weekends. According to the CDC, previous research has found that many adults visiting the ER at night reported they did so because doctors’ offices weren’t open. Additionally, the CDC has reported that nearly two-thirds of pediatric ER visits are considered non-emergent. Providing pediatric care at night could play an important role in lowering the number of nighttime visits to local emergency rooms, reducing overcrowding and wait times.
There are a variety of reasons families might choose to use all-night pediatric urgent care instead of waiting for their primary physicians’ offices to open. Some non-emergency illnesses children experience, such as ear aches, can be extremely painful. A long sleepless night caused by pain can often compound these problems. Infants experiencing issues such as a high fever might have difficulty eating and sleeping, potentially leading to additional health problems. While these issues might not warrant a trip to the ER, many parents would prefer not to wait through the night to address their children’s suffering.
This business model isn’t structured to replace the services of children’s primary care providers. The intent is to complement those providers, rather than competing with them. In order to provide continuity of care, Good Night Pediatrics forwards all relevant medical information to the child’s primary care provider, allowing families to follow up with their pediatrician later.
It is highly important for families to identify which children’s health issues warrant a trip to urgent care or the ER. Significant health issues such as seizures, severe bleeding and severe broken bones, for instance, warrant a trip to the ER. Additional information about when to take children to urgent care or the ER is available on the clinic’s website, at www.goodnightpeds.com.
Keeping children healthy is a 24-hour responsibility, and it is often valuable for families to explore new options for care. Good Night Pediatrics encourages families to consider all of their options for care when children experience health issues, during daytime and evening hours alike.
Larry Blumenthal is the chief financial officer at Good Night Pediatrics.