VA changing to daytime urgent care
Less than a year after a $3.2 million expansion, the Spokane Veterans Affairs Medical Center is eliminating emergency services at night.
Starting Saturday, the center will become a daytime urgent care clinic, a move officials said is aimed at providing services when they’re most needed.
“They see very, very few patients after the hours of 4:30 p.m.,” said Megan Streight, spokeswoman for the Veterans Integrated Service Network, which oversees the Spokane center. “They do have this wonderful new facility, but it doesn’t make sense to staff it when people aren’t coming.”
About 22,000 local veterans were sent letters June 15 notifying them of the change, Streight said.
The change was not a response to criticisms leveled by staff doctors that the safety of patients was endangered by high workloads, staffing shortages and inadequate training, said Chuck Marsden, chief of acquisition, nutrition and material management.
“No, actually, it was based more on need,” Marsden said.
Of the 15 or 20 patients seen on weekdays and 30 on weekends, only a few show up outside the clinic’s new hours, he said. “There’s just six to eight all night long.”
Hospital officials have hired a new urgent-care director and reallocated staff to better reflect the center’s purpose, he added.
“We are an urgent-care center. We never have been an ER. It was always urgent care,” he said.
An emergency room is equipped to handle trauma cases, something the VA facility never claimed, Marsden said.
But a doctor who works at the center said it was billed as an emergency room when it was dedicated on Veterans Day last fall, in a ceremony attended by U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris.
But the center never had the resources to provide true emergency services, said the doctor, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.
“If it’s an ER, we don’t have the staff, lab, radiology, doctors to support it,” he said. “Even though the perception might be that we are an ER, we are not. In order to get from point A to point B to actually be an ER, it would require a huge investment we don’t have.”
A group of 10 local doctors sent a letter to hospital officials a year ago outlining problems that included chronic overwork, low staffing and inadequate training. Some doctors said they were forced to work shifts of 24 hours or more.
When the letter was made public in January, center officials promised to address the concerns. Marsden said Tuesday he did not have enough information to comment on the doctors’ issues and that no other managers were available.
Patients who need urgent care after hours should visit a hospital emergency room, Streight said. Those with less pressing problems will be able to reach a nurse 24 hours a day through an expanded telephone care program.
Elimination of evening hours at the VA center won’t have much effect on busy emergency rooms across Spokane.
Several hospital representatives said the center’s estimated 250 nighttime visits a month could easily be absorbed at sites used to 3,000 to 6,000 visits in the same period.
“I think it will be minimal impact,” said Pam Baynes, manager of the emergency room at Holy Family Hospital in north Spokane.