Ruraltown Community Clinic

Most of what happens to your health happens here rather than across the street. The sore throat on day five. The blood pressure that has crept up since last year. The physical your daughter needs before she can practice. The refill, the rash, the shoulder, the worry you have been sitting on for a month.

Four providers see patients here: two physicians, a nurse practitioner, and a pediatrician who splits her time with the hospital. Between them they cover newborns through the end of life, and most families in town see the same one for years.

If you woke up sick

Call at eight when we open. We deliberately leave slots empty every morning for exactly this, and you will usually be seen before lunch. We would much rather fit you in than have you sit on something for three days or go to the emergency department for a sinus infection.

If we genuinely cannot see you and it should not wait, the emergency department is four blocks north and open at every hour.

What happens in these rooms

Checkups from the first week of life onward, immunizations, and the sports and school physicals that pile up every August. Annual exams and Medicare wellness visits. The long running work of diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol, and lung disease, which is less dramatic than surgery and probably saves more people.

Also a fair amount of minor surgery in the office: stitches, removing things off skin that should not be there, draining an abscess, injecting a joint that has stopped cooperating.

Prenatal care runs out of this building. Counseling and psychiatric visits happen here too, in the same waiting room as everything else, which is deliberate.

Why the hospital owns a clinic

For thirty one years this was Harold Vance’s practice, and Dr. Vance delivered a sizeable share of the people currently living in Ruraltown. When he retired in 2011 no buyer appeared, which is the normal outcome for a solo rural practice.

A town that loses its clinic tends to lose its hospital inside ten years, because primary care is what feeds a hospital its patients and its reason to exist. The hospital board understood that arithmetic and bought the practice. Same building, same front desk, same staff. It has been part of the same organization since.