After Hours Calls

After Hours Calls
For questions regarding non-urgent calls or calls during office hours, please see our office policies.

If you have a medical emergency, please dial 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. If you have an urgent question that is not a medical emergency, you may call the office number – (303) 783-3883 – and you will receive instructions how to contact the physician on call. Please ensure that you leave your area code and phone number. We strive to answer calls in a timely manner. Please note that calls are directed to the cell phone of the physician on call. Therefore, if the physician is in an area where there is no cell service, such as inside a hospital, there may be a delay in our receiving your message. Therefore, if your call is not returned in a timely manner, please keep trying to call us again. Please ensure that you do no have “call block” on your phone, as this will prevent us from contacting you. The physicians do have “call block” on their cell phones. Remember that we can only contact you if you give us your correct phone number and your number is accessible to us.

Urgent calls include the following circumstances:

• Your child has new-onset diabetes and requires assistance determining his/her
  insulin dose
• Your child has diabetes and is ill and you require assistance managing his/her
  diabetes
• You have an urgent question regarding the management of your child’s diabetes
• Your child is experiencing a side-effect from medication that we have prescribed
• Your child is ill or injured and you have a question about what to do with his/her
  medication

We ask that you do not call us for prescriptions after hours.

This ought to be done during office hours, before 4:00 P.M., Monday to Friday. If you require diabetes supplies or medication after hours, the pharmacist will usually assist you until the next office opening, whereupon you can call our office. This may mean that you will have to pay for that medication or for those supplies out-of-pocket. Thus it is your responsibility to obtain prescriptions from your physician or nurse practitioner during office hours to avoid such circumstances. We do not make calls to pharmacies after hours. If there are extenuating circumstances and your pharmacy requires a prescription after hours, your pharmacist will need to call the physician on call. If you have not been seen at our office because you have failed to make an appointment or if you have failed to show for your last appointment, we reserve the right to refuse to prescribe medication or to issue a time-limited prescription, to allow you to make another appointment. This is in accordance with the principles of good clinical practice.

If you have diabetes or other endocrine disorder and you require urgent advice, we will be happy to provide it. However, under no circumstances will we provide any advice about any other primary care issues. Therefore, by way of example, if you have diabetes or adrenal insufficiency and your child is vomiting, we will offer advice only about the diabetes management or the adrenal medication, but we will not offer advice about the vomiting, the underlying cause for the vomiting, management of the vomiting, etc. All questions about such primary care issues will need to be directed to your primary care provider and will be handled as per their practice policies.