“Convenience.”
That’s the word Dr. Robert Aranosian used to sum up the main reason why the POH Medical Center in Oxford expanded its hours and services to become an “Urgent Care” facility and is working toward becoming a 24-hour Emergency Room by July 2004.
“If somebody fractures their wrist at 10 p.m. on a Sunday, instead of driving 20 miles to the hospital, they can come here,” he said.
Aranosian, who serves as Director of Emergency Services for POH Medical Center and its branches in Oxford and Clarkston, announced to the Oxford Village Council last week that the medical center is now open 365 days a year from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.
During those hours, the medical center will always have one emergency physician and between two and three emergency nurses on duty, Aranosian said.
As an Urgent Care facility, Aranosian said the Oxford center will be able to handle many “low priority emergencies” that would have otherwise been taken to a hospital Emergency Room, such as an asthmatic having trouble breathing, diabetic with low blood sugar, serious laceration or child with a high fever.
“A child with a 104 (degree) temperature shouldn’t have to go 20 miles (to a hospital),” he said.
According to Aranosian, about 70 percent of the cases typically treated in a hospital ER can now be handled at POH Medical Center Oxford.
Of that 70 percent, the doctor said about half those cases “can be taken care of in any (medical) setting” while the other half are derived from people who use the ER as their “doctor’s office” because they’re either low income or have no health insurance.
Only 30 percent of ER cases actually need to be in the ER and half of those end up being admitted to the hospital.
The Oxford medical center’s status as an Urgent Care facility means “convenience” for area residents, Aranosian said.
“Say someone’s having a picnic on a Sunday and they get charcoal in their eye,” he said. “Before, they might have spent two to four hours in a hospital ER and their day would have been shot. Now, they can come here, the doctor can take care of them and have them back at their picnic in no time.”
Besides convenience, the Urgent Care facility can also improve a patient’s odds at survival, Aranosian said.
He noted that if someone came to the medical center having a heart attack, doctors can begin emergency treatment and get the patient stabilized for transport to the hospital.
Aranosian said the purpose of emergency medicine is “not the savings of lives, but the decreasing of morbidity, preventing the situation from becoming life-threatening.”
“Once in a while God allows us to save a life, but the main goal is stop that runaway train, to keep it from becoming life-threatening,” the doctor said.
Sometime between now and July 2004 “at the very latest,” Aranosian said POH Medical Center Oxford will become a 24-hour-day Level 3 Emergency Room.
“Getting the staffing together is the main thing” that must happen before the center can become an ER, Aranosian said.
When POH’s Oxford location opened in 1980, Aranosian said the facility was open 24 hours a day, but then it changed to a family practice.
The center’s eventual return to 24-hour operations represents “a hell of a commitment to the community” on POH’s part, Aranosian said.
“In a time of a lot of (budget) cuts, POH is making a huge financial commitment here,” he said.
A 24-hour ER in Oxford also represents POH’s “fulfillment of a promise” that was made 23 years ago, Aranosian said. “We’ve come full-circle.”