Providing accessible, affordable quality care

Happy summer! It was wonderful seeing so many of you in May in Las Vegas at the 6th annual Retail Clinician Education Congress. The event was a tremendous success, thanks to our colleagues at DSN Collaborative Care. We have already started the planning of 2014’s conference. We have received feedback from many of you about the conference and will be incorporating your suggestions into the format and layout of the conference next year. If you have ideas for us, please feel free to reach out to me any time.

The Convenient Care Association was very excited to introduce our first book, “Convenient Care Clinics: The Essential Guide for Clinicians, Managers, and Educators,” published by Springer, at RCEC. This is the first comprehensive book about setting up, operating and practicing in a convenient care clinic. The book addresses all key medical and operational considerations pertaining to running these local retail health clinics that are rapidly proliferating in pharmacies, supermarkets, airports and other locations throughout the United States. Key features of the book include:

• Essential information needed to establish, operate and practice in a convenient care clinic or urgent care clinic;


• Relevant information for practitioners, including NP-DNPs, PAs, clinic managers, CNOs, graduate nurse/PA educators and students;


• Relevant information about the 20 top conditions seen in retail health clinics, including workup and treatment regimens;


• Metrics associated with retail medicine; and


• Philosophy of retail care and parameters of primary services.

The book is available for purchase through Springer Publishing at SpringerPub.com. It is a must-read.

CCA recently has partnered with the National League for Nursing to host a roundtable discussion to examine current employment trends around the country for advanced practice nurses and to brainstorm transformative educational strategies to meet the staffing needs for new models of healthcare delivery. This meeting, held in May, brought together representatives from the retail health industry, national nursing organizations and nursing leaders, and was the first of many conversations around these important issues. Some of the important recommendations that came from the meeting included curriculum development in nursing programs that incorporates the convenient care clinic model, scholarship creation for both nursing students and academic leaders within the convenient care clinic arena, clinical preparation for new graduates and leadership development. CCA will continue to engage with the nursing and physician assistant communities to keep the conversation going about opportunities in the retail clinics for growing the healthcare work force and helping to meet the needs of healthcare reform.

Thanks for all you do to provide accessible, affordable, quality care to millions of Americans in retail-based convenient care clinics across our great nation.