Sick of emergency room wait times? Not dying?
Morris Parkers now have another healthcare neighborhood option.
ProHealth, offering “urgent care” treatment for unexpected but non-life-threatening ailments, opened up in March on Morris Park and Hone avenues, within eyeshot of the emergency room at Montefiore Medical Center’s Weiler Division on the Einstein campus that locals gripe is overcrowded.
Quick wait times
“The wait time here is usually how long it is to fill out your paperwork,” said Juan Feal, facility supervisor. “If it’s a primary care issue, and you can’t get in to see your primary doctor, it’s the quickest way to be treated.”
ProHealth’s stable of emergency room doctors stitch up cuts, x-ray minor bone injuries and treat fevers, the flu, insect bites and other dire but not life-threatening conditions. If an issue proves more serious and may require surgery or an overnight bed, the doctors there can ship patients to a nearby emergency room.
Popular with Nabe
The site is winning support from neighbors happy to see more healthcare options in the area and tired of the long waits at Weiler/Einstein, which they say have ballooned in the last few years to several hours.
“It’s clean, consumer friendly, and convenient. It’s a no-brainer,” said Al D’Angelo, vice president of the Morris Park Community Association.
The convenience of urgent care sites can often prove valuable in either addressing minor problems fast or uncovering larger ones.
D’Angelo said that a friend of his went into ProHealth recently with pesky cold symptoms and was diagnosed with pneumonia and sent to the emergency room, where he spent a few nights.
“He thought about just waiting it out, but since it was convenient, he stopped in,” said D’Angelo. “Otherwise he never would have known how bad it was.”
Monte’s got sites too
ProHealth, which is open Monday-Friday 9 a.m to 9 p.m and on weekends from 9 a.m to 6 p.m, is by no means the only option for east Bronxites looking for quick treatment of minor but urgent issues.
Montefiore has some its own urgent care sites in the area, including its Bronx East site on Westchester Avenue near Castle Hill Avenue, which is open until 10 p.m on weekdays and 5 p.m on weekends, though the healthcare titan has no urgent care sites in Morris Park.
The Montefiore Westchester Square hospital has also since March 2013 been serving as a “freestanding emergency department,” with no beds but the capacity to treat patients at all hours of the night.
