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As Ellie Wilson waited for her name to be called at a Philadelphia emergency room, she felt nervous and uneasy. She found herself surveilling the other patients.
“You have parents with their young children who are coughing, stifling, sneezing … and that’s all coming out in the air,” she said. “You’ve got a man six seats down from you, puking in a bucket.”
All of this felt like a threat to her and her extremely compromised immune system. Wilson, a Pennsylvania resident, was diagnosed in July 2023 with triple-negative breast cancer.
“When you have a disease like this, and it compromises every inch of your body, you have to think about what the other people around you are doing,” she said. “And it’s terrifying.”
Before learning that she had this aggressive form of cancer, Wilson had already been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory disease that causes inflammation and ulcers along the lining of the colon. The combination of chemotherapy and this other existing condition landed Wilson in the ER for gastrointestinal issues during the duration of her treatment, especially since cancer treatments often come with gastrointestinal issues like nausea and vomiting.
Trips to the ER are not uncommon for oncology patients. During treatment, patients in this population experience side effects such as nausea, vomiting, fatigue and even blood clotting.
But when patients cannot schedule a quick appointment for their acute but immediate needs, they often turn to the ER, where they may be exposed to infectious diseases. Cancer centers in Philadelphia have been filling this gap by providing oncology urgent care, specialized clinics that serve cancer patients who experience side effects from treatment that need immediate attention.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center’s clinic, the Oncology Evaluation Center, recently extended its hours to be available 24/7.
“We wanted a solution for our patients so they could spend as much time as possible outside the hospital while still being safely monitored as frequently as they need, depending on their treatment,” Lindsey Zinck, chief nursing officer for the Abramson Cancer Center at Penn Medicine, said in an email.
The center, which first opened in 2016, extended its weekday hours and offered weekend visits in 2024. After seeing good results in terms of patients avoiding ER visits, it became available around the clock.
“We increasingly saw our patients needing transfusions on the weekend, after-hours care that couldn’t wait for the next day,” Zinck said. “Our emergency department does a wonderful job for emergencies, but sometimes our patients need care that can’t wait for clinic hours and doesn’t need an inpatient stay.”