Doctors opening walk-in medical clinic

Newton Medical Center will be leasing space to a partnership of local doctors to open a walk-in clinic in August in Newton.

The clinic, which will be run by a partnership of doctors from Hesston’s Mid-Kansas Family Practice and Newton’s Axtell Clinic, will be in the Medical Park building in front of the Newton Medical Center and adjacent to the dialysis center.

The center was built last year, and the second floor is occupied by Anesthesia Billing Inc.

The walk-in center will occupy about 1,700 square feet of the Medical Park building.

Steve Kelly, NMC president, said the hospital had been looking for a group of physicians to run a walk-in clinic for several years when the doctors stepped forward with a plan for a limited liability corporation.

“Every group I have talked to in the community, the No. 1 thing they ask is, ‘When are we going to get a walk-in clinic?,’” Kelly said.

The LLC will run the center and hire a new doctor to staff the facility, Kelly said.

The hours have not be set for the center, but it will likely be open evenings and weekends, Kelly said.

Kelly said it is the hope of hospital staff the walk-in center will take off some pressure for the NMC emergency room, in which the traffic has been steadily increasing.

“We have seen a paradigm shift in this community in health care,” Kelly said. “People want health care on demand.”

Kelly said about 60 percent of the patients the hospital sees in the emergency room are not emergency cases. Kelly said the walk-in clinic will be a much less expensive alternative to emergency room care.

Studies of other communities in which walk-in clinics are located indicated emergency room visits went down the first year, Kelly said. After that, traffic at the hospital went up as people became more acquainted with the local hospital campus and patients were referred to local primary care physicians.

Kelly said he hopes the center will connect more patients with primary-care physicians and facilitate residents getting more preventive care.

“The idea is to hook up patients with primary-care physicians and improve their quality of life by addressing ongoing health problems,” Kelly said.