CareCentral in Stoughton Offering Urgent Medical Care in a Convenient Setting

Your child is running down the first base line, trying to leg out an infield single in a youth baseball or softball game, and ends up tweaking an ankle, landing awkwardly on the first base bag. 

Is the ankle sprained, strained, or worse, fractured?

Where in the past the child may have been taken to the emergency room, Everton Weeks and Dr. Renee Wilson-Weeks say they have opened an alternative place to go in cases like this - a place that still offers the same urgent care, but in a more cost-efficient, convenient setting, without the long waits. 

This past November, the husband-wife team opened up CareCentral Urgent Care, located at 286 Washington St. in Stop & Shop Plaza in Stoughton. The business is a member of the Stoughton Chamber of Commerce. 

Essentially, CareCentral can supplement primary care services and can be an alternative for urgent, but non-life threatening emergency room care. 

Everton and Renee live in neighboring Canton and after looking at various locations found Stop & Shop Plaza as the right setting to bring what they feel will be a "growing trend" in health care to the Stoughton area.  

Everton is a banker by profession, he said, and has a background in IT and promotions. He doesn't see patients, but is the business manager.

Renee has extensive experience working in emergency rooms, and still works at the ER at Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton. She is joined by a number of medical professionals with experience in both emergency medicine and family medicine seeing patients of all ages at CareCentral.

Working in an emergency room, Renee said she sees patients come in for issues that are not life-threatening that could be dealt with in a more convenient setting. 

"[You will] very rarely see people sitting waiting here," Everton said, noting that CareCentral's suburban location is plus, allowing patients to avoid the traffic they might face by traveling to ERs in the city. 

While there are some appointments, many patients are walk-in. Their goal, they said, is to have patients in and out in less than an hour (depending on the severity of the situation). 

In the spectrum of health care, with primary care physicians on one end and hospital care on the other, CareCentral falls somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, "straddling both extremes," Everton Weeks said. 

In addition to providing services typical of a primary care physician (like a standard physical), "we can do a lot of what primary care physicians can't do, like X-rays," Everton said. And some of what CareCentral offers overlaps with services provided by an emergency room, short of dealing with traumas and other life-threatening issues. 

CareCentral has a lab for testing, state-of-the-art medical recording and a digital X-ray all on site. 

Services offered include treating common non-life threatening illnesses for adults and children; minor cuts and burns; sprains, strains and simple fractures; offering physicals for school, sports and the workplace; gynecological exams; drug screening; preventive care; and travel medicine. 

They do same-day strep testing, deal with sinus infections, ear and eye infections, nose bleeds, gastrointestinal pain or illness, kidney stones, morning sickness, urinary problems, and offer liver function tests, cholesterol screening, diabetes screening, and pregnancy testing, just to name a few. 

Most insurance plans are accepted. Patients without insurance coverage can self-pay. 

Going along with their theme of convenience, CareCentral is open seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the weekends. 

"There was an opportunity to provide better [urgent care] service in a retail establishment," Everton said. "[Emergency Rooms] can't provide that level of convenience."