DC Child Accident & Safety Blog

Small medical clinics sprouting at the back of drug stores, grocery stores and big box outlets stress speedy service, but at what price? According to pediatrician Roy Benaroch, MD, who publishes the online blog The Pediatric Insider, these “McClinics” are the medical equivalent of fast food -- filling but not nourishing.

McClinics offer exactly what children don’t need, Benaroch says. Good pediatric care "looks at the whole child, the whole history, and the whole story. To do a good job I have to review the history, the growth charts, the prior blood pressures, the immunization records, and more. At the retail-based clinic, the encounters are just a quick toss-off: an opportunity for genuinely improving health that’s thrown away.”

Good pediatric care requires good training, Benaroch says, whereas McClinics are staffed by midlevel providers who may have minimal pediatric experience. Children are not the same as adults, and without specific, ongoing, significant pediatric training, the nurses at the local McClinic may not have the skills to adequately assess a child.

Benaroch recently reviewed two cases of children from his own practice who were clearly mishandled by a local McClinic. . One was a child given a vaccine he didn’t need, the other involved treating a urinary tract infection without doing the appropriate testing beforehand.

Benaroch also notes that some clinics offer special cut-rate sports and camp physicals to lure patients away from their primary care physicians for well-checks, even though “the heart of the well-check is to review all current issues, to look at the big picture, to make sure all health-maintenance tests and immunizations are up-to-date.” McClinics, he says, cannot offer that service without a thorough review of past records.

Source: The Pediatric Insider