Unlike many other cities such as Chicago where the traffic is just awful all of the time, you never really know what to expect here in Indy when it comes to the traffic on the morning commute. On the best days there is minimal traffic and flow is uninterrupted. On the worst days flow will be thick throughout with occasional bumper-to-bumper interruptions. What's particularly interesting is that there seems to be no pattern to the change in traffic flow. It can be at any time during the commute and on any work day.
Last Thursday happened to be pretty bad in terms of traffic and there was one reason: the police. There were police everywhere with multiple cars pulled over. One part of the expressway goes from 3 lanes to 2 lanes and has an immediate 90 degree turn (I would love to meet the engineer who designed this route...) and this morning a cop had a car pulled over right before the drop to two lanes, resulting in a nearly mile long line of stop and go traffic. I drive the morning commute every day here and the overwhelming majority of people are driving sanely. Why, why, why do the police find it necessary to send half of their force out to pull people over during this time of the day? It creates ten times more problems than it solves. There has to be something better for them to be doing.
No new ridiculous ER visits. I take that back, there have been a couple but when I ask them the logical question (Did you call your doctor? This, of course, is assuming they have a doctor.) they often tell me their doctor told them to come to the ER, despite the fact that it was obviously not an emergency. I could probably write an entire book on gaps in our health care system, but suffice it to say that in my opinion we need to re-evaluate how health care is delivered in our country. The old fashioned model of the doctor's office with appointments may not be adequate in today's society. Places like immediate care centers are helping to fill these gaps and reduce resource wasting like ER visits for sore throats.
The immediate care centers aren't a new idea. Madison had some thing like it with the Madison Clinic. Been a long time but I remember it as a fairly large building with about 12 exam rooms and about two or three doctors on hand most of the time. We saw the same doctor most of the time but if he was unavailable, another doctor was there to do things like giving tetanus shots or sewing up injuries.
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting. I just kind of assumed they were relatively new. I am sure, however, that the number of actual immediate care centers as increased dramatically over the past 10 years. We seem to have them everywhere here in our city.
ReplyDeleteI hate it when the cops jam up traffic around here. Don't they know that 465 is our personal daily Indy 500? hehe
ReplyDeleteYour list of ER visits is one of the reasons I'm not sure I want to be an ER nurse. At least by the time they get to the med/surg floor, they kinda need to be there.
@Katie: I agree, though there have been plenty of times when I've been seeing patients on the medical floor and for the life of me I can't figure out why they are still here or were ever admitted in the first place.
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