In August 2010, Dr. Heskith Vanterpool started offering urgent care services at his Eureka Medical Clinic in Road Town, making it the territory’s only private clinic to offer emergency services from 6 a.m. to midnight daily.
Now, Dr. Vanterpool is taking another crack at offering an urgent health care clinic, this time at Bougainvillea Clinic, which he purchased in January 2010.
The doctor said he’s confident he has the facilities and staff to make private urgent care a permanent feature in the Virgin Islands.
“[Eureka Urgent Care] was an idea before its time,” he said last week at the launch of the urgent care clinic at Bougainvillea. “Like many things in life, somebody starts an idea and because conditions aren’t right it didn’t survive. But later on, someone puts some additional touches on the idea and it’s a success.”
Around the clock
Dr. Vanterpool said he has everything he needs to offer urgent care services around the clock: facilities such as digital X-ray machines, hospital beds in which patients can stay overnight, and two state-of-the-art operating theatres that will open next month.
The biggest adjustment will be staying open 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, he said.
“We already had the facilities,” he said. “It was just the huge decision to decide to be open beyond regular working hours.”
Dr. Vanterpool said Bougainvillea will offer just about every health care service besides intensive care.
Though Bougainvillea is a licensed hospital, he explained, serious heart attacks and other critical emergencies should be taken to Peebles Hospital.
“We are not a place for gunshot wounds or major stab wounds,” he said. “I want to make it clear that we’re not a place for that.”
However, he did say that he will have his staff prepared to make the initial treatments for serious emergencies until the patient can be transferred to Peebles.
Copayments
At the Feb. 15 launch of his new service, Dr. Vanterpool also addressed the issue of prices at his clinic.
While many of the other services offered at Bougainvillea cost more than what the National Health Insurance programme covers — leaving the patient with a higher co-payment — the urgent care services will mostly stick to the NHI-prescribed costs, he said.
“Urgent care facilities will be accepting, basically, the fees NHI is willing to pay,” he said, adding, “Some services will be more expensive. Government doesn’t supply my equipment or pay my staff, so people need to be prepared to pay for services. I cannot promise you necessarily that you won’t have some additional co-payments to pay.”
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