Walk-In Medical Care And More At Ideal Family Practice
By Ron Bukley
Ideal Family Practice & Walk-In Express Care, which opened last year at the recently constructed Medical Groves Plaza on Southern Blvd., offers a holistic, preventative approach to healthcare.
“We are nurse practitioners, so, generally, we care for anyone kindergarten age and up for primary care, and anybody a year and up for urgent care,” explained Tina Dochniak, DNP, ARNP, who has partnered with Stephanie Wise, ARNP, to operate a clinic that can offer most primary and urgent care services of a doctor’s office, but on a more personal level.
Urgent care services include immediate attention that is often not available at a doctor’s office.
“Say you wake up and you have a sore throat,” Dochniak said. “You don’t have an appointment, so you just walk in. That can be anywhere from wounds and not feeling well to abdominal pain and chest pain.”
Dochniak and Wise are looking to serve families who need primary care, as well as flexibility.
“Kids are sick, you can’t get in to see your primary doctor because they don’t have walk-ins, or there’s a limited amount of walk-in appointments,” Wise said. “We have walk-in from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” Wise said. “You can still come in and get your physicals. There’s continuity of care in the sense that when you’re sick, you’re not going to one of the other urgent care centers where they may not know your blood pressure medicine. We’re all on the same system.”
Both Wise and Dochniak grew up and attended local schools, including college.
“We know the area, we know the people, we had a patient base in this area already,” Wise said. “The opportunity arose. We didn’t actually pick this spot; it kind of arose out of a need for a walk-in facility and an overflow-type of thing for the [doctor’s] office next door. We looked at it as a wonderful opportunity, especially to be out here in the western communities.”
Wise, attended the King’s Academy and lived in the Loxahatchee area. Dochniak attended John I. Leonard High School. They both attended Palm Beach State College and Florida Atlantic University, where they received their ARNP degrees, and Dochniak also received her doctorate in nursing.
“Nurse practitioners are trained a little bit differently than physicians,” Dochniak said. “We are trained from an RN level to look at the patient as a holistic person, so we treat not only from a medical model, but also, the goal of nurse practitioning is to keep the patient healthy. It’s a lot of teaching about how to stay healthy.”
Wise said their office is a model of healthcare that Florida is catching up to.
Dochniak noted that nurse practitioners in Florida are more restricted in what they can do than most nurse practitioners nationwide.
“Nurse practitioners in many parts of the U.S. have been in practices on their own for years,” she said. “The movement is coming to Florida.”
In Florida, nurse practitioners work with a collaborative physician who signs a protocol with the state that takes responsibility but doesn’t have to be directly in the day-to-day care of patients.
“I think we have the opportunity to have more time with the patients and get to know them on a more personal basis,” Dochniak said. “The way that healthcare is moving, there’s not a lot of physicians who do primary or family practice anymore, so nurse practitioners are filling that gap.”
Dochniak and Wise have arranged their schedules so one of them is always available when the office is open. “We take care of each other,” Dochniak said. “When one of us is not here, the other one is here.”
Ideal Family Practice & Walk-In Express Care is located at 13475 Southern Blvd., Suite 100, in Loxahatchee Groves, just west of Palms West Hospital. Call (561) 231-5200 or visit www.idealfamilypractice.com for more information.
