Historical December 1975 clinic service description, not current medical advice.
The Clinic is regularly open on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings. However, on some nights, it is open for “First Aid and Referral”, when a doctor can not be present. During those nights, the Clinic can offer some services which do not require a doctor’s presence.
What can be done without a doctor? Quite a few things, because a registered nurse IS always available.
First of all, we can do the traditional “First Aid” services—removing splinters, immediate bandaging, etc. — but with the added dimension of evaluation and referral to the most appropriate source of care, for that particular problem.
We can also do some other primary services. We can provide immunizations for children, as we will also do in our proposed daytime immunization service. We can apply tuberculosis skin tests (often required for school and job, and which take two days for reading).
We can also draw blood for the routine VDRL’s, which are also often required for certain jobs.
Our lab can do certain tests: urine tests for pregnancy; chemical urinalysis, which may be useful for our diabetic neighbors. In addition, we can do blood pressure monitoring, such as we do in our PECOS outreach program.
Additionally, we can offer advice on what is often thought of as “nursing management” — diet management, methods to increase patient comfort (if, for instance, you will have to wait until the morning to see the dentist, methods to achieve patient comfort become very important!).
Therefore, what we can not do without a doctor is to diagnose disease and prescribe treatment. However, from the foregoing, it is apparent that the “First Aid and Referral” service of the Clinic can provide quite a range of useful, interim health maintenance services.
Originally published in The Paper, December 1975.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1975_12.pdf, printed page(s) 7; PDF page(s) 7.
