Welcome back to Urgent Care Unscripted. I'm Barbara Ronalter, the director of operations and business development at AFC Urgent Care and West Haven. And this is Mohamed Saman. I'm the franchisee and owner of the Sears into this table. Thank you for tuning in. Today's episode we're going to talk about preventative care. What is preventative care. Why does it matter and why does your urgent care. How can you urgent care help in that situation. Before your, sick and you have a problem.
What can your urgent care do for you? For you? So typically, you're coming to the urgent care with a twisted ankle or, or a flu on Covid test. But you can also come for preventative purposes. And what could those be? Could be a checkup. It could be a screening. It could be a vaccine, and it could be other situations where you need, some preventative attention. Absolutely. So what we say is don't wait, come see us before your problem happens. And that's basically all preventative care.
Care means, right? So if you want to make sure that you are getting your blood work done, making sure that you're checking your blood pressure, urgent care is can definitely help you in that situation. So and what is really, preventative care, it could be, physical exam. It could be a blood pressure check. This could be a cholesterol, could be diabetes screenings. It could be, cancer screening. It could be vaccines. It could just even be just talking to a provider about your health situation.
Yeah. You just want to make sure. Am I on the right track? Is this the way that I should continue? The way that I'm, you know, keeping up my health? Am I taking enough vitamins in my doing my prescriptions correctly? Do I need prescriptions for, you know, high blood pressure, diabetes or whatever that might be? As you know, health care is not, about perfection. It's a journey. So you're coming in once a year, maybe six, and maybe once every six months or once every three months.
But you're just checking. You're keeping track of how you have is at that moment of time in comparison to where you were when you came the last time. Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of people don't think about this, but urgent care is can do a lot more than just your, you know, immediate care. So if you are feeling symptomatic and you feel like something's off and it's been off for a while, you can come in to an urgent care. You can get tested for whatever that might be.
We can get you initially treated. And if you do need follow up care like a primary care doctor, we can go ahead and, get you to see somebody that can actually help you in the long run. And when it comes to, getting, some preventative care, we can perform all kinds of physical. It could be, physical. It would be, sports physical or school physical. Could even be other integration purposes. Physical. But beyond that, you could also come in for a wellness exam.
You could come in for vaccines, or you could come in for screening. If you haven't checked your blood pressure for a while or you're shooting for life, here we are to help you with those, screenings that we do there. So yeah, absolutely. I think that even brings up a topic or an example that we saw a patient today that came in to see us, and she hadn't been to a primary care doctor in a couple of years.
She's complaining of shortness of breath and a couple of other health issues, that or a couple other symptoms that she's been having for a little bit. And we did a chest X-ray on her. Come to find out, a patient has COPD, something she was diagnosed with in the past but hasn't followed up on. So right away our provider took care of her, gave her the meds she needs to kind of take care of the problem initially.
But other than that, we also referred her over to our local, primary care physician that we trust in the area and got her an appointment to see him right away. So that brings us to a point where we, sometimes referred to be as, compliant patient. What do we mean by compliant patient? It does not mean you have to do everything perfectly, but it means that you have to come and get checked regularly. So health is not something that's just one time.
It's not a one and done. One and done. It's a journey. And here we are here for you to take you along. That journey. And you don't really have to do it alone. Absolutely. And we are here for you. You know, whether, like Muhammad mentioned, if you have if you're if you got diagnosed with diabetes and your doctor isn't available and you want to get checked to make sure that you glucose is okay, come to the urgent care, we'll do a fingerstick.
If your blood pressure is off and you need a blood pressure check, we can do that for you as well. So just know that we might not we might not be your primary care doctors, but we can definitely help you in your health journey to keep you as healthy as you can be throughout your, throughout the years. And the key word is right there preventative care, which means you don't really have to get sick to come for a preventative care.
You can you can come in anytime, even when you're not feeling sick, when you you're actually feeling strong and healthy. That could be a good time for you to come and have a check on. Yeah, absolutely. So make sure that you guys are coming in to see whether it's us or even your primary care doctor, but we can definitely see you. It's not a one and done. Health care is never a one and done. So we can come in, we can help you. We can get you through it.
We can get you the meds that you need and, get you on your way to live a happy, healthy life. And we're open seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays. So if you are feeling like you don't have the time, now would be a good time for you to come and get some preventative too. Yeah, absolutely mom. And hit the nail on the head right there. No appointments are needed. You don't need to wait three months. I know that happens a lot with your PCP.
You call a primary care doctor and you can't get in. They're very busy, very busy doctors. And there's not a lot of them, unfortunately. So we are here to help you. We can get you through until your three month appointment. That's not a problem at all. So keep that in mind and walk in whenever, wherever you need it is for you here, for our listeners and viewers, it's exactly. So take charge of your health. Preventative care is about you staying well and not just getting better when you're sick.
Here we are at AFC Urgent Care West Haven. We have not just an urgent care center. We are not your backup plan. We are your partner to stay on track. Have to do that. Yeah, definitely. Come see us. We are at 354 Sawmill Road in West Haven. Thank you so much for listening. And until we see you again, this is Mohammad and Barbara and Urgent Care Unscripted. Please, look forward to joining our next episode. Until then, see you next time. Bye.