SIH, Harrisburg celebrate opening of Urgent Care Center

Southern Illinois Healthcare celebrated the opening of its Urgent Care center in Harrisburg on Friday, a facility designed to provide immediate care to residents of southeastern Illinois without going to a hospital emergency room.

The public joined employees on Friday for a ribbon cutting, open house and tour of SIH Urgent Care, at 901 Commercial St. The building also houses SIH Work Care.

The Harrisburg Urgent Care will be open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. 365 days a year. It will have a laboratory, X-ray and other diagnostic functions.

Patients with life-threatening trauma, strokes or heart attacks, etc. should call 911 and go straight to the ER, while other patients - those needing same-day medical care for sports injuries, deep sprains, stitches, burns, colds and coughs can come to Urgent Care.

The new Urgent Care facility takes insurance, but also does a cash pay-as-you-go system for people without insurance.

Patients coming to Urgent Care can drive there and walk in without an appointment, where they will be listed in a queue in order of when people arrived. However, patients can also get into the queue early, by signing up at sih.net/urgentcare and estimating when they will arrive at Urgent Care.

Once inside, patients can expect to wait no more than five minutes before being called back to talk with medical personnel, and the entire visit will take no more than 42 minutes from the time a patient walks in the door to the time he or she is walking out again.

The Harrisburg Urgent Care opened Friday, April 1. Nurse practitioners are the medical providers day to day in the Urgent Center, overseen by a director who is ER-trained and on standby in case needed.