Pittsfield Gets New Urgent Care

CORRECTION: Lynn Thomas-Perry is the Executive Director of the Saline Chamber of Commerce. A previous version of this article erroneously said she was President of the Saline Chamber, which she is not.

The greater Saline area has a new urgent care. Springfield Urgent Care opened its fifth location at 7025 East Michigan Avenue on January 7 with the cutting of the ribbon using scissors provided by the Saline Chamber of Commerce.

Lynn Thomas-Perry, left, holding up the ribbon just before it was cut, Monday.

“I’m really excited about having urgent care again in the community. St. Joe’s was here and closed, so we had no one; and we don’t have the Saline Hospital anymore, so this is big stuff,” Saline Chamber Executive Director Lynn Thomas-Perry said.

Dr. Tressa Gardner said that she and her business partner James Harral picked the Saline area for their new location because of the lack of urgent care facilities in the area.

“We are the bridge between your primary care doctor and the emergency room,” Harral said.

Dr. Gardner, left and James Harral, right.

The new facility’s interior is wide, handsome, and flexible in its floorplan. In addition to wide reception rooms, the facility offers X-ray services. Less expensive than an ER visit, the company offers care for everything from pneumonia treatment to physicals.

“We try to pick areas that can help support areas that don’t have immediate access,” to healthcare, Gardner said. “The beauty of urgent care is that you can come and see us any time we’re open. My training is in emergency medicine, which fits very much what I do on a regular basis. We take care of injuries, medical issues [and] physical therapy.”

About thirty people attended the opening. One of them was Kim Kaster, whose Brewed Awakenings coffee shop shares the building with the new Urgent Care.

Exterior of the Urgent Care.

“This is a beautiful place and we really need them in our community. I’m really glad they’re here,” Kaster said.

Springfield Urgent Care has four other locations in Clarkston, Hamburg, Highland and White Lake.

The facility will be opened from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day, Harral said. The only exceptions will be on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. They will be only open on those holidays if staff volunteer.

Gardner, Harral, and an employee, in one of the rooms.

Saline’s longstanding lack of healthcare options led to the City Council to create a task force to find ways to attract more healthcare options to Saline. But the task force was not in any way involved in the creation of the new establishment, and neither Gardner nor Harral said that they had been aware that the task force was operating. Councilors Jack Ceo and Dawn Krause both said they were not aware of the establishment either.

“Even though this urgent care wasn’t a result of our work, we are still super excited about it. Because our goal is to bring more healthcare to the Saline Area and that is what this has done. It doesn’t stop what we are doing to bring more healthcare to Saline,” Councilor Krause, who was not at the opening, said. “We do not have enough healthcare. We’ve lost a lot of healthcare over the last number of years – we lost a hospital, doctors offices, other urgent cares. The ones we have now usually have a wait to get in.”

While welcome, Krause said that the city still needed more lab work and diagnostic capacity, more X-rays and especially more mental health.