By Kaylynn Ebner
Nearly all parents know the terrible anxious feeling that happens when a child gets sick or injured and is in need of immediate medical care. You want them seen by a caring pediatric specialist who can accurately diagnose the problem and start the road to recovery—now. Unfortunately, this kind of urgent care is hard to come by, says Stacey Silva, who has seen first-hand how typical urgent care facilities fall short of what families need.
For this reason, Silva recently opened Your Kid’s Urgent Care in New Providence, where compassionate and knowledgeable pediatric specialists can do everything from diagnosing an ear infection, to splint a broken bone, to test for COVID-19.
Silva recalls the impossible task of searching for a pediatric urgent care facility for her daughter after office hours. Rather than drive an hour with a sick child to a pediatric urgent care facility, Silva chose a general urgent care site that ended up misdiagnosing her daughter. “Kids present differently and have different symptoms than adults. That’s why we have pediatricians in the first place,” states Silva. “You wouldn’t take a child to an internal medicine physician. Why should it be any different with urgent care?”
Your Kid’s Urgent Care in New Providence employs all pediatric providers, and Robert J. Deutsch, MD, MPH, Director of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Saint Barnabas Medical Center, is the facility’s medical and lab director.
Another issue with urgent care that Silva wanted to fix is what occurs after the appointment. If a child needs a nebulizer or an x-ray, for instance, a parent shouldn’t have to drive from place to place looking for the right medical equipment and services. “After having an experience like this with my daughter, I had an epiphany. I wanted to open an urgent care facility that was not only focused on children but also provided everything that parents need to help their child,” Silva explains. “So, Your Kid’s Urgent Care is all-encompassing. We have x-ray equipment and can do bloodwork and rapid testing. We can send out additional tests and cultures when necessary. We can treat lacerations and have everything needed to splint injuries in preparation for an orthopedist visit. We can even administer the first dose of a medication if it’s too late to get to the pharmacy to help get the child through the night.”
Silva, who has been in the medical device field for her entire professional career, also wanted to make sure it was easy for patients to get seen quickly. Your Kid’s Urgent Care allows patients to “get in line” for an appointment time on their website. Registration paperwork can be completed at home, and parents get a text message with updates and reminders about their appointments.
Your Kid’s Urgent Care (www.yourkidsurgentcare.com) is located at 1286 Springfield Avenue, New Providence, NJ. Your Kid’s Urgent Care accepts most major insurance plans.