As of Aug. 22, Santa Clara Valley Healthcare has expanded urgent care services at Valley Health Center Gilroy, offering care seven days a week from 8am-5pm.
Valley Healthcare officials said the expanded hours aim to improve access to care in South County and help reduce pressure on hospital emergency departments, particularly at St. Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy.
“Expanding healthcare access in Gilroy, Morgan Hill, and San Martin, and unincorporated areas is a decisive action to meet our community where they are and protect vital access to care,” said Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, Vice President of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. “This expansion, along with other recent investments, such as introducing cardio care at St. Louise Regional Hospital, continues the county’s commitment to serving the healthcare needs of our families in South County.”
Urgent care is available for nonemergency medical concerns, including minor cuts and wounds, broken bones and sprains, colds and coughs, mild allergic reactions, minor accidents and falls, and vomiting, diarrhea and dehydration.
Walk-in and scheduled appointments are available for adults and children from newborns through age 18.
St. Louise Regional Hospital has experienced a 48% increase in emergency room visits during the past five years, according to Santa Clara Valley Healthcare.
“Expanding urgent care relieves pressure on emergency departments across the county, but this will be especially beneficial to St. Louise Regional Hospital,” said Paul E. Lorenz, CEO of Santa Clara Valley Healthcare. “Offering weekend urgent care hours allows emergency departments to focus on serious or life-threatening emergencies, such as a heart attack, stroke or traumatic injury.”
Valley Health Center Gilroy is located at 7475 Camino Arroyo.
Valley Health Center Morgan Hill, located at 18550 De Paul Drive in Morgan Hill, also offers urgent care Monday through Friday from 8am-10pm and weekends from 8am-5pm.
Appointments can be scheduled through Valley Connection at 888.334.1000. Emergency departments or 911 should be used for life-threatening medical emergencies.
Abroad, we Canadians are often envied for our supposedly universal healthcare; yet, in a sufficiently significant way, it already comes second to huge-profit interests, thanks to the big pharmaceutical industry’s seemingly insatiable greed. Canada’s “universal” health-care system itself may inevitably include crucial health treatments that, at least in a timely thus beneficial manner, are universally inaccessible — except for those with the money to access privately at for-big-profit prices.
It’s very expensive and morally wrong when our elected governments promise the populace much-needed universal (albeit generic brand) medication coverage, as Canadians have been more than once by ours, only to cancel it after the industry (inevitably successfully) threatens to abandon its Canada-based R&D, etcetera, if the government goes ahead with the ‘pharmacare’ plan. While such universal medication coverage would negatively affect the industry’s superfluously plentiful profits, the profits would nonetheless remain great, just not as great.
An Angus Reid Institute study found that over the previous year almost a quarter of Canadians decided against filling a prescription or having one renewed due to medication unaffordability. As a result, many low-income outpatients who could not afford to fill their prescriptions ended up back in the publicly-funded hospital system, therefore costing far more for provincial and federal government health ministries (ergo taxpayers) than if the medication had been covered.
Clearly, a truly universal healthcare system needs to be supported by a ‘pharmacare’ plan. Instead, we continue to be the world’s sole nation that has universal healthcare (theoretically, anyway) but no similar blanket coverage of prescribed medication, however necessary. Ergo, in order for the industry to continue raking in huge profits, Canadians and their health, as both individual consumers and a taxpaying collective, must lose out big time.
Mega corporation lobbyists — especially those representing the huge and very powerful/influential pharmaceutical industry — tend to pull corpocratically orientated Western governments (especially those of Canada and the U.S.) by the nose. Once in power, established political parties will kowtow to big business’s threats of transferring or eliminating jobs and capital investment, thus economic stability, if corporate ‘requests’ aren’t accommodated.
‘We are a capitalist nation, after all,’ the morally-lame justification may go.