Take Care Clinics: Are they a viable option for nurse practitioners?
“Take Care Clinics” is the brand name of Walgreens Health and Wellness Division convenient care clinical services. Convenient care clinics, sometimes called "retail clinics", are providing medical care and preventative healthcare in new settings like retail stores, supermarkets, and pharmacies and at a reasonable price. They are also creating a completely new job market for nurses with advanced degrees.
In the article, Take Care Clinics Help Patients Do Just That and More, the author states, “Never before could one enter a medical facility and be treated for an illness after a minimal wait, and then be able to fill any necessary prescriptions and perhaps even pick up a few groceries all in the same place.”
Expanded services
Expanded services to be offered soon are “vaccinations, health risk assessments, and follow-up care". Further growth is set to bring injection and infusion therapies, which have been piloted in Florida, as well as chronic disease treatment that will employ pharmacists for disease and medication management, states the article.
Low-cost high-quality healthcare
Walk-in retail clinics are becoming the go to place for people on fixed incomes, low incomes or those with no incomes because every injury or illness does not necessitate the services of a physician.
Nurse practitioners (NPs) are more than capable to give injections, camp physicals, remove splinters or diagnose common ailments. “Costs will drop as more of the tasks performed only by doctors shift to nurses and physicians' assistants,” states this article in the Wall Street Journal.
More job opportunities for nurses
As more and more convenient care clinics open so do job opportunities for nurse practitioners. NPs are being recruited in a variety of sections of the U.S. as the affordability and ease of using convenient care clinics are convincing patients to skip the ER and go shopping instead.
