Comparing Walk-in Clinics and Urgent Primary Care Centers

Walk-in clinics are non-hospital based primary care facilities that are designed to operate without appointments and provide increased healthcare access with extended hours. This blog summarises results of a study that identified publicly-reported access characteristics for episodic primary care in British Columbia (BC). It provided a clinic-level comparison between walk-in clinics and UPCCs.

Why compare walk-in clinics and urgent primary care clinics?

Urgent Primary Care Centers (UPCCs) were introduced to British Columbia (BC) in 2018 as an additional primary care resource that provides urgent, but not emergent care during extended hours.

Led by Dr. Rita McCracken, MD, PhD, who’s a Family Physician and an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, the study entitled “Access to Episodic Primary Care: A Cross-sectional Comparison of Walk-in Clinics and Urgent Primary Care Centers in British Columbia” was published in November 2023.

How was the study done?

This cross-sectional study used publicly available data from all walk-in clinics and UPCCs in BC. A structured data collection form was used to record access characteristics from clinic websites. This included business hours, weekend availability, attachment to a longitudinal family practice, and provision of virtual services.

What has the study found?

In total, 268 clinics were included in the analysis (243 walk-in clinics, 25 UPCCs). Of those, 225 walk-in clinics (92.6%) and two UPCCs (8.0%) were attached to a longitudinal family practice. Only 153 (63%) walk-in clinics offered weekend services, compared to 24 (96%) of UPCCs.

Walk-in clinics offered the majority (8,968.6/ 78.4%) of their service hours between 08:00 and 17:00, Mon – Fri.

UPCCs offered the majority (889.3/ 53.7%) of their service hours after 17:00.

Most walk-in clinics are associated with a longitudinal family practice and provide the majority of clinic services during typical business hours.

Next steps. More research that includes patient characteristics and care outcomes, analysed at the clinic level, may be useful to support the optimisation of episodic primary health care delivery.

Source: McCracken M.A., Cooper, I. R., Hamilton, M.-A., Klimas, J., Lindsay, C., Fletcher, S., Price, M., Hedden, L., & McCracken, R. K. Access to Episodic Primary Care: A Cross-sectional Comparison of Walk-in Clinics and Urgent Primary Care Centers in British Columbia. Primary Health Care Research & Development. 2023;24:e66. doi:10.1017/S1463423623000580

Study first published on medRxiv (May 2022) and in the journal Prim Health Care Res Dev (Nov 2023).

If you enjoyed reading this post, you might like reading more about primary care here