Office Update - 9/5/20

Happy Labor Day weekend! We wanted to share some office updates for the coming months with all of you. We continue to adjust office protocol as necessary to make sure that your experience in coming to the office is a safe one during the pandemic. We also understand that the start of school will result in different needs for appointments and services in our office. Typically, we begin our walk-in clinic on the Tuesday after Labor Day. We will not have in-person walk-in clinic for the foreseeable future as this does not allow us to pre-screen patients and families for symptoms which may put others at risk. However, beginning Tuesday, 9/8 our phones will go on at 8AM in the Foxboro office and both nurses and front desk staff will be available to answer questions. We will also have virtual walk-in clinic available from 8AM-9AM each weekday at https://doxy.me/psfw. If you call, we can offer in-person visits for certain complaints such as injuries, ear pain, urinary tract infections, and certain rashes. Other complaints such as cough, congestion, sore throat, and fever may be seen in person, but will be scheduled in our designated sick office for that day after 3PM when well visits have ended in that office.We will continue to offer well visits, follow-ups, and same day visits for non-infectious causes from 9AM-3PM in both offices. One office or the other will transition to sick visits at 3PM on each day. In addition, on Tuesday, 9/8 we will resume evening hours in one office or the other from 6-9PM on Monday through Thursday nights. These hours will be limited to in-person and virtual sick visits, as well virtual visits for medication follow-ups. No well visits will be provided during evening hours at this time. Masks are required by patients, caregivers, and staff at all times in our office.  We are hard at work developing a plan for our patients to receive the flu vaccine. We support the mandate that anyone in school, daycare, college, etc receive the flu vaccine as anything we can do to decrease fever and respiratory symptoms this winter will improve the ability to manage any surge in COVID and will help the cause to keep schools open at least for some in-person learning. The flu vaccine has been around for many years, has been shown to be exceedingly safe, and even when it does not completely prevent illness, it can shorten the duration or decrease the severity of the flu.We will be offering the flu vaccine during evening clinics where sick visits are not being seen. We will offer multiple evenings as we will need to keep the numbers at each clinic low so that we are able to maintain appropriate distancing. Patients and caregivers will be required to wear masks at the flu vaccine clinics and we ask that if you anticipate your child will be difficult about receiving the vaccine that you please make alternative arrangements with our office to receive to receive the vaccine at a different time of day.We will have more information about the timing of flu vaccine clinics in the coming week and will update you when they are available to schedule.It is our pleasure to serve you and to help manage your healthcare needs during this time. We have all been challenged personally and professionally by the pandemic and by all accounts we still have a way to go. We will adjust as needed and will remain available to all of you in some manner. We encourage you to maintain mask use, social distancing, and adherence to the guidelines, even as our own children push us to test the limits. These measures have had an effect and have hopefully bought us time as we get closer to vaccine availability for COVID. Stay safe and best of luck with the start of school!