Hope of Emergency Department relief with new Urgent Care Clinic open

A new urgent care clinic has opened in Eaton to take pressure off the Emergency Department. The clinic, located at the popular Eaton Fair Shopping Centre, is fully-bulk billed and will be open every day of the year from 7am-8pm. The Health Hub underwent a six-week transformation, keeping its existing health facilities but now also includes a ward and a nurses’ room to see patients with urgent needs. This includes those having anaphylaxis, those with broken bones and those needing tests for STIs or UTIs and other urgent but non-life threatening issues. WA Senator Louise Pratt and Collie-Preston MLA Jodie Hanns attended the clinic after it had been open for four days and had already experienced a higher than expected number of patients. “There was a lot of work in a very short period of time,” he said. “But all of our team believed that this is what the community needed and so we were willing to just dive into it, we did long hours, lots of work but we got it together. “Just about everyone has said how fantastic that we’ve set this up, they’re very grateful. “Particularly parents with young children that they’ve now got somebody that they know that they can go in extended hours and on weekends without necessarily having to take them and their family and sit in ED.” According to the Government, more than 5000 people have presented to the urgent clinics since they opened, mostly in metro areas. Senator Pratt said about 45 per cent of presentations to Bunbury Regional Hospital are non-urgent or semi-urgent and the new facility will help take pressure off the system. “The Greater Bunbury Medicare UCC will mean people in this community who need urgent but not acute care, can get it quickly even if it’s outside standard hours and all they’ll need is their Medicare card,” she said. “I know many families who have had to wait long hours at the emergency department for non-life-threatening issues. “This Medicare UCC will ease pressure on local EDs and be much more convenient for our communities, closer to home, at short notice, and bulk billed under Medicare.”