Urgent Care

Urgent Care medicine is quickly becoming the newest field within the ranks of today’s practices of medicine. Most often staffed by family practitioners, urgent care is a well-balanced mixture of family and emergency medicine. This field of medicine was developed from the need of people to have their acute illnesses and injuries treated right away, without having to bear either the long waits of emergency rooms or the inability of their family doctors to be able to squeeze them in to see them in a timely manner.

With many medical students facing the dilemma of choosing a career between family and emergency medicine, the Family Practice Residency Program at St. Joseph Medical Center has responded to this need by instituting an Urgent Care tracking program, giving residents the ability to become comfortable with both the intricacies of family medicine and the procedural aspects of urgent care. Total length to completion of this program is only three years, which is a whole year less than emergency medicine!

In conjunction with the medical knowledge and skills gained from learning family medicine through the St. Joseph Family & Women's Center, the Urgent Care track will provide the resident with the skills necessary to efficiently treat acute illnesses and injuries. The urgent care tracking resident will become very comfortable in many outpatient procedures such as laceration repair, foreign body removal, and casting. Special months will be devoted entirely to sub-fields of urgent care, such as sports medicine and occupational health.

Unlike other programs of this nature, the residents in this program will also become trained in the business of urgent care medicine, learning the fundamentals of how to start up their own urgent care center, how to staff their center, how to code and bill properly, and what equipment is necessary for a successful urgent care center.

Through the collaboration of Berks Emergency Physicians and Premier Immediate Medical Care, the residents at St. Joe’s will have many opportunities to work and be trained by emergency and urgent care physicians. If you have ever debated on a career in either family or emergency medicine, then look no further – the Urgent Care tracking program through the Family Practice Residency Program at St. Joseph Medical Center is your answer!