Pharmacy opens state's first in-store clinic

Facility is one of 28 planned for this year

Nurse practitioner Judith Zickl (left) met with Rosemarie Spada of Norwood at the MinuteClinic in a Medway CVS store. (DAVID KAMERMAN/GLOBE STAFF)

MEDWAY - The milk advertisement (just $3.89 a gallon!) hanging in the window of the Main Street CVS was normal enough. But the sign next to it was a little different. That sign was peddling in-store health care, the sort that comes with a nurse practitioner, vaccines, and diagnoses.

Past the snack and makeup aisles, just to the right of the gift-wrap display was the state's first MinuteClinic. There, in two rooms that seemed as if they had been ripped from a doctor's office and plopped down into the CVS, nurse practitioners went about their day, white coats and all, treating the ill.

"See you later, alligator," one nurse called to a little girl as she left the office in her father's arms.

The clinic's opening, the first of 28 planned this year in Massachusetts, follows months of controversy surrounding in-store retail clinics in the state in the midst of a shortage of primary-care doctors.

Open nights and weekends, the clinics offer a flashy, digital menu of treatments for a variety of minor illnesses. For $59 they will treat your cold sore. For $10 more, they will help you with your case of mononucleosis. And when the flu bug is going around, you can stop by for a $30 vaccine. Of course, prices vary depending on a person's insurance plan, and for anything more serious they refer to an emergency room or family physician.

MinuteClinic began pushing into the Massachusetts market more than a year ago, but was quickly met with fierce opposition from doctors and others, including Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who worry that the clinics could fragment healthcare and compromise quality.

Donna Haugland, MinuteClinic's chief nursing officer, thinks much of the opposition is just a negative gut reaction and that, given time, people will warm up to the idea.

"I think we need to do whatever we can as a society to make healthcare as accessible and convenient as possible," she said. "We need to come to where people are."

And yesterday, she had done just that.

As Haugland spoke, she sat in a clinic room. On the counter were typical doctor's office fare, jars full of bandages and tongue depressors, a row of otoscopes, the pointy things physicians stick in your ears.

"Anytime things change, there's discomfort," she said. "We're not here to disrupt health care; we're here to enhance it."

To that end, she said, MinuteClinic shares patient records with all clinics, both in Massachusetts and in other states. They also make an effort to provide a patient's primary physician with a record of the visit. If the patient does not have a physician, nurses are supposed to help find one, Haugland said.

Candy Heenan, who lives near the CVS, said she has watched as the MinuteClinic emerged.

Too bad, she said, it was not open a couple of days earlier. She was shopping at CVS on Sunday and thought about setting up an appointment for her stuffy nose.

"There's a good possibility I would have tried it," Heenan said about the clinic. "It's just going to be interesting to see how many people use it."

By Wednesday evening, nurses had seen three patients, which was about what was expected for the clinic's first day. As more people use it, MinuteClinic expects to staff both examination rooms full time, offering examinations that managers hope will not take more than 15 minutes..

Since MinuteClinic got the ball rolling, Walgreens Pharmacy has submitted plans for 15 of its own clinics. Ultimately, MinuteClinic would like to set up 100 sites statewide.

"This is so needed; there is absolutely no question," said Judith Zickl, a nurse practitioner and MinuteClinic's state manager of operations. ". . . We're going to look back on this in 10 years and say, 'Why didn't they do this sooner.' "