FERRIDAY — Riverland Medical Center has been expanding its healthcare presence over the past couple of years, including new additions the hospital wants people to know more about.

A little more than a year ago, Riverland acquired local provider Living Well Family Clinic in Vidalia and also made some recent changes at Riverland Family Clinic in Ferriday. Representatives at both sites said they could benefit even more people if more residents knew about them.

In fact, a lot of patients who visit Riverland Medical Center’s emergency room could save themselves some time by instead going to the Ferriday clinic, Family Nurse Practitioner Lauren King said.

The Ferriday clinic even stays open late on Monday nights to take in emergency cases, which could save people a good amount of waiting time rather than heading to the hospital.

“That’s like our after-hours service,” King said. “Instead of people going to the emergency room for minor needs such as upper respiratory issues, (they can come here).”

Riverland Family Clinic is open from 8 a.m. through 8 p.m. on Mondays, as opposed to their regular closing time of 5 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday.

The clinic implemented the after-hours service in July 2017 when King took a page from the book of a former employer in Sicily Island. Still, King said she still sees many patients go to the hospital when they could simply visit the clinic and that she hopes more people take advantage of the late hours on Monday.

“I see a lot of that … (patients) going in for a sinus infection because they didn’t know we were open,” she said. “We’re pushing that late day.”

Additionally, the clinic took on pediatrician Dr. Carrie Bonomo, who has been treating patients full-time at the clinic since January, said Brandy Spears, Riverland marketing department head.

The clinic also has an obstetrics and gynecologist who rotates through the clinic weekly on Tuesdays and a urologist who comes through three times a month, Spears said.

As for the clinic’s overarching outlook, King said she likes to sit down with her patients and get to know them before treatment. In that regard, Riverland Family Clinic and Living Well Family Clinic in Vidalia are very much alike.

“We see ages 0 through 100, and I’m not sure that there’s any insurances that we don’t take,” said Melissa Johnson, family nurse practitioner at Living Well Family Clinic.

Johnson’s mantra involves treating patients the right way. In fact, she said the hospital unapologetically might even “spend a little too much time with our patients.”

But in her mind, the staff owes it to patients to treat them with kindness and care.

“People come here in their most vulnerable states … we just want to make their experience here a pleasurable experience and make every patient that walks through our doors feel like we care about them and that we have their best interests at heart,” Johnson said. “You can’t go wrong if you treat every patient as if they were a member of their own family.”

Though some confusion used to exist about what patients the clinic would take and what kind of conditions they could handle, Johnson said the facility sees cases that run the gamut.

“We see pretty much everybody,” she said. “If you can think of it, we treat it or get people where they need to get treated for it.”

Riverland added Living Well to its family of providers in January 2017 in an effort to expand outside of Ferriday.

“The major purpose of that (purchase) was just to extend out into that Vidalia market,” Spears said. “The opportunity became available to us, and it just seemed like a good fit.”

Since then, Johnson said she believes the acquisition has made the clinic more equipped to serve its patients as best as possible. She credited Spears for seeing their relationship with the hospital grow, and Johnson said she feels that over time the clinic has become more and more “a part of the team.”

“I do feel like they care about the patients we see here, too,” Johnson said.

Dr. Kevin Ingram supervises both the Ferriday and Vidalia clinics, located respectively at 204 Serio Blvd., Ferriday, and 1643 Carter St., Vidalia.