Baptist Health wants to provide any kind of care you need within just a few blocks on Nicholasville Road.
There is its primary care facility with nine practitioners at the corner of Jesselin and Nicholasville Road. Next to it is its Home Health Care operation in the former Rector-Hayden Realtors building. For emergency care, there’s the recently renovated and expanded hospital at 1740 Nicholasville Road, just a few blocks from primary care.
On October 1, the primary care building is adding an urgent care component, the third Baptist Health facility in greater Lexington to do so.
Baptist Health, which has similar primary/urgent care arrangements at its practices on Harrodsburg Road and at Brannon Crossing in Nicholasville, wants patients to be able to easily sort out the care level they need.
Primary care is for routine appointments, management of chronic conditions, testing and minor ailments. Urgent care is more likely to be used by those who don’t have a primary care doctor and for sudden-onset troubles such as sprains, possible broken bones and conditions that the patient isn’t sure merits an emergency room visit, such as closing a wound.
Urgent care is also sometimes the choice for “those who need a doctor for the first time in a while,” according to Dr. Stephen Toadvine, vice president of physician integration for Baptist Health Lexington. Urgent care can also be useful for patients who have been to the emergency room or hospital and need a follow-up appointment to assess their progress, he said.
One of the reasons for the various choices is that patient co-pays and co-insurance payments can vary according to which type of care a patient chooses, said Baptist Health Lexington spokeswoman Ruth Ann Childers.
Part of the need for urgent care services is that there are patients who have had trouble finding a primary care provider to manage their conditions before they become serious, Toadvine said. If a visit to urgent care is deemed serious enough to demand an emergency room visit, the patient is loaded into an ambulance and sent to the Baptist Health emergency room, he added.
“We certainly need and want the patients in the right situations at the right time,” Toadvine said. “... The more primary care we provide, the more emergency care we prevent.”
Monday is typically the most busy day in emergency rooms, Childers said. That’s because people who became ill or suffered an accident over the weekend and don’t have a regular medical home will wait to get taken care of on Monday.
But, Baptist Health reasons, if some primary care options are available on the weekend, along with urgent care hours, patients are seen sooner and diverted from having to wait with those with more serious conditions in the emergency room.
Childers calls it “meeting the patient where their needs are.”
Kentucky One Health offers urgent care at 217 Fountain Court from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. The University of Kentucky medical system, including Kentucky Clinic near the UK Chandler Hospital on Limestone, does not offer side-by-side primary and urgent care.
However, UK spokeswoman Laura Wright said that the organization will “continue to create capacity for patients who need quick access to care and look for opportunities to streamline care options for our patients.”
The Baptist Health Nicholasville Road urgent care center will be open from 8 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Friday and from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.