24-hour care hard to find

Fremont Medical Center is one of the few clinics left in the valley

JACOB KEPLER/VIEWDr. Bikas Sharma examines a patient on Jan. 31 at the Fremont Medical Center, 4880 S. Wynn Road. The clinic is one of the few that is open 24 hours a day. Advertisement

The Fremont Medical Center Primary Care clinic, 4880 S. Wynn Road, is one of the few non-emergency room 24-hour medical care facilities left in the valley.

"We don't do a lot of research on our competition, so we don't know for certain," said Ernest Barela, president and chief operating officer of Fremont Medical Center. "That clinic has been open that way for 12 years, and it's our only one (open 24 hours). All the others have extended hours, and our pediatric clinics are on call seven days a week."

FMC operates children's clinics at 5575 S. Durango Drive, 100 N. Green Valley Parkway in Henderson, and at 3150 N. Tenaya Way, Suite 260, and primary care clinics at 9499 W. Charleston Blvd. and 595 W. Lake Mead Parkway in Henderson.

The Wynn Road clinic is approximately 20,000 square feet and offers complete services, including X-rays, family practice and workers' compensation referrals, billing and medical records, nurse calls and general wellness.

Barela said finding the right staff -- and enough staff members -- is one of the primary reasons there is a lack of 24-hour clinics operating in Las Vegas and elsewhere.

"It's so expensive and difficult to staff them that we can only afford to do one," he said. "It's a much different dynamic. It's like running a casino. You're open all the time, but you still have to clean (the facility), which is more difficult because you never close. And you have to have management on call 24 hours, which is a very unique thing about my job."

Running a graveyard shift is difficult in any business, Barela said, but in the understaffed medical industry, it becomes nearly impossible, and certainly not economically feasible.

"We just feel because of the way our company is set up, it's important for us to have a 24-hour care center," he said. "We've been around 22 years, and we take care of a lot of self-insured workers and companies like Boyd Gaming, Station Casinos and others. And when you see the wait times in emergency rooms, you know they have their own struggles, and a lot of times, patients would be better off with us or with their family doctor."

Other FMC clinics are open until 8 p.m. For more information, visit www.fmcnv.com.

The independently operating Harmon Medical Center, at 150 E. Harmon Ave., just off Koval Lane, also is open 24 hours every day for urgent care needs. The majority of patients there are tourists from the resort corridor seeking medical attention. For more information, visit www. harmonmedicalcenter.com.

-- View staff writers Brock Radke and Jan Hogan