Patrick County Urgent Care, an urgent care facility in Claudsville, Va., closed its doors Nov. 14, according to a notice posted in the window of the former physician’s office and obtained by Radio IQ Nov. 14.
According to the report, founding physician Patrick Cole, MD, opened the practice in 2020 to respond to a heightened demand for healthcare services in the community that resulted from the closure of a nearby hospital. The COVID-19 pandemic hit months later, triggering a severe drop and then spike in patient volume.
Staffing shortages ultimately became too severe for the practice to survive, as has been the case for many rural practices over the last several years.
“In the end, we lost our nurses and we lost our providers who resigned, and we couldn’t replace them fast enough,” Dr. Cole told the publication. “So we ran out of personnel, was the reason we closed.”
Dr. Cole added that he plans to reopen the urgent care facility once more practitioners move to the area, as he expects over the next several years. The practice will no longer operate as an urgent care facility, but as a rural clinic that will be called Stuart Family Practice.
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