Tower to open Montco urgent care center
New facility will be the health system’s 25th urgent care
The new Montgomery Township facility will be the health system’s 25th location.
WEST READING » Tower Health has announced that it will open a new urgent care location in Montgomery Township on Monday, Feb. 15. Located in the Gwynedd Crossing Shopping Center, 1210 Bethlehem Pike, the new Tower Health Urgent Care center will be the health system’s 25th location.
“We are excited to bring another Tower Health Urgent Care facility to the Montgomery County community,” Charles Barbera, MD, Tower Health vice president, pre-hospital and unscheduled care, said in a press release. “Our goal is to provide high-quality, accessible care to our patients right in their own community and this new location is (an) opportunity to do just that.”
The Berks County-based health system’s network of urgent care centers are open every day from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., providing walkin care for a variety of conditions. Flu vaccines and COVID-19 testing are also available at all Tower Health Urgent Care locations, while rapid COVID-19 testing is available for those experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.
Tower Health Urgent Care was formed in late 2018 when Tower Health completed its acquisition of 19 facilities then owned by Premier Urgent Care. The goal of the acquisition, the company said at the time, was to expand Tower Health’s services portfolio to span a complete continuum of care.
When the acquisition was completed in December 2018, Tower Health became the largest provider of urgent care services — based on weekly visits — in the metropolitan Philadelphia area.
Urgent care provides an important avenue for Tower Health patients to access healthcare services, particularly when their primary care provider is unavailable or if they do not have one, the release stated.
The new facility will be staffed by board-certified physicians and advanced practice providers. To provide fully integrated care, all Tower Health Urgent Care Centers use EPIC, the electronic medical record in use across Tower Health. EPIC brings patient health information from Tower Health care sites into one health record.
After quick growth, Tower Health has been struggling financially — posting losses that grew steeper during the pandemic. Executives had said Tower Health may need to sell hospitals or other assets. However, in a letter to employees Jan. 29, Tower Health CEO Clint Matthews said no decisions about facilities have been made.
The Berks County-based Tower Health owns seven of the region’s hospitals including: Brandywine Hospital in Caln Township, Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia, Jennersville Hospital in Penn Township in southern Chester County, Pottstown Hospital in Pottstown and Phoenixville Hospital in Phoenixville — which were acquired in 2017 — as well as Reading Hospital in West Reading and St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia. It also includes Reading Hospital Rehabilitation at Wyomissing; Reading Hospital School of Health Sciences in West Reading; and home healthcare services provided by Tower Health at Home.
WASHINGTON » President Joe Biden has wasted no time in dumping a batch of major Trump administration policies. He rejoined the Paris climate agreement; ended a ban on travelers from mostly Muslim countries; canceled the Keystone XL oil pipeline; and reversed a ban on transgender people serving in the military.
Biden and his team are tiptoeing, though, around one of Donald Trump’s signature legacies: His goit-alone moves to start a trade war with China and bludgeon some of America’s closest allies with tariffs on their steel, aluminum and other goods. The moves upended seven decades of U.S. policy in favor of ever-freer trade but did little to achieve Trump’s goal of narrowing America’s vast trade deficit.
For now, the Biden administration seems intent on approaching trade cautiously. Most striking is what Biden hasn’t done: He hasn’t called off Trump’s trade war with China. He hasn’t promised to scale back or cancel his tariffs on imported steel and aluminum or to end an impasse that’s left the World Trade Organization unable to function as arbiter.
Instead, the administration’s policymakers are focusing on urgent priorities — distributing COVID-19 vaccines and providing much more aid to a pandemic-pounded economy.
“He is going to take his time,” said Mary Lovely, a Syracuse University economist and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Biden has said repeatedly that he needs America to be stronger before he takes on a lot of these trade issues.”
Reversing Trump’s trade policies poses risks for a Democrat who is close to unions unhappy with America’s pre-Trump free-trade consensus and depends on support from the industrial Midwest.
Democrats are still stung by Trump’s surprise victory in 2016. Trump abandoned the modern Republican Party’s support for free trade agreements. Instead, Trump cast himself as a populist defender of manufacturing workers — who would eradicate unfair trade practices and restore factory jobs.
For Democrats, Trump’s 2016 victory provided “a harsh lesson about the perils of a trade policy that’s not thinking about working people but (about benefiting) finance and agribusiness,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
Mindful of that lesson, Biden’s team has promised a trade policy that will support U.S. workers. “We will use trade, in coordination with both international and domestic economic tools, to create a more inclusive prosperity for America and Americans,” Katherine Tai, Biden’s choice to be U.S. trade representative, said in a speech last month.
The new president has promised one significant change from Trump’s America-above-all trade stance: Biden wants to patch up relations with key U.S. allies, such as the European Union and Canada, which were bewildered by Trump’s belligerent policies.