The Urgent Care Convention is the launchpad for many of the new products and services for the year from our vendor community, the Urgent Care Association (UCA), and our affiliates. This year is no exception, so I wanted to tell you about a few big things coming out in May.
The first is a new organization. Last year, the UCA Board voted to elevate our quality department into its own organization to better recognize quality in the field of Urgent Care. This move aligns us with other large professional healthcare organization groups that have separate accrediting bodies. It is thrilling to have advanced this far as a field, so we are very excited to unveil the Commission on Ambulatory and Urgent Care Quality (CAUCQ).
CAUCQ—run by the same great team from UCA—will lead standards development and recognition for all the field’s operational scope and quality. They will continue to collaborate with the Urgent Care College of Physicians (UCCP) as a partner in elevating Urgent Care quality both clinically and operationally.
This move also creates a new voice in the field to speak independently on issues related to quality operations in walk-in care settings. It makes us all a little louder. The inclusion of “ambulatory” in the name is also intentional, allowing for future expansion of quality standards into all the ways that Urgent Care and adjacent on-demand medicine are evolving. Having a fifth voice will help amplify all that the field is working towards together.
Landmark Effort
The second launch is UCA’s landmark effort to help address your ongoing staffing shortages. For many years, we have left recruiting to our members because we were unable to find or create a platform that was any better than what everyone was already using. That changed last May, and we’ve been working on it ever since. This month, we are launching UC Compass—a new website where you can “Find Your People”—whether you are a clinician looking for a job or an organization that’s hiring.
UC Compass is map-based, adopting technology that is new to recruiting but familiar in home buying and selling. That familiarity makes it easy for job seekers to search within a geographic area and follow an area where they are (or may be) interested in working. No more scrolling through boring, endless listings; you can look exactly where you want to be.
If you are an employer, prospective employees will always be able to find you because hiring organizations will have a permanent, visible presence even when you don’t have a job opening. Clinicians can always see where your centers are, and they can easily contact you for potential openings. No more wasted money on listings that you fill overnight or filling one position then needing to hire another and having to start over. The annual subscription provides unlimited postings and changes for all your centers, which is much more aligned with the way Urgent Care recruitment actually works!
Lastly, we are excited to announce a new direction for the Urgent Care Foundation (UCF). As we have been clarifying the roles of all 5 of the organizations in our Urgent Care universe, we kept coming back to a gap: public relations. While we’ve done lots of work on scope and standards, we do not yet have a unified, national, recognizable Urgent Care “brand.” We need this brand so patients know what we can do, payers appreciate what we can do, and the healthcare workforce understands what’s great about working in Urgent Care. We believe the Urgent Care Foundation is best suited to create, share, and manage those brands.
As a foundation—rather than a trade association or professional society—UCF has an educational and informational mission, and we want to take that mission and see how far and how fast we can run with it. Starting this month at the Foundation Celebration, we are launching this new role and will have lots more to say about it in the months to come. We hope you are as excited as we are to see where this branding will take us. Thanks, especially, to the UCF Trustees for leading us up this new path. More to come!
