Hey, for once I agree with Flea’s stance. He writes on the advent of retail medical clinics:

Fleas have no one to blame but themselves for the retail-clinic phenomenon. We triage patients to the ED after hours. We refuse to make ourselves available by phone and email after hours. We educate our patients to the effect that minor illnesses require intervention by a “health care provider”.

All these things created an overwhelming demand for medical services that the children of this country do not need. And now the AAP has the chutzpah to bitch about the advent of retail-based clinics!

Being adversarial against these clinics isn’t going to help. It’s a fact of life and physician offices need to adapt. Work with them – use them as primary care referral base. Change to open-access scheduling. Making them the enemy is the wrong approach.