A new facility has opened in Selma that aims to help eliminate long waits at the doctor’s office and provide residents the care they need without having to leave town to find it.

Public officials and the community welcomed Selma Urgent Care to town with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Wednesday.

Physician and managing partner of Selma Urgent Care Sai Namburu said urgent care offers nearly all the services of a primary care doctor and an emergency room without the long wait.

“Urgent care is between the primary care doctor’s office and the emergency room. Basically, urgent care can provide almost all the facilities where a patient can get all the things they can get in an emergency room apart from major trauma,” Namburu said. “Normally at a primary care doctor’s office, you set up an appointment to go see the physician and stay for two or three hours in the waiting room to be seen. Before we had urgent care here, the next option was to go to the emergency room.”

Namburu said long waits are not the fault of the hospital because some people have to come from Thomasville due to its lack of a hospital.

He added that urgent care had been proposed for Selma years ago, but there was opposition for fear that it would take away from the hospital.

However, Namburu said urgent care is a complementary service to the hospital and a win-win for both entities because it’ll take the pressure off of the hospital, while helping residents by eliminating long drives to other facilities in cities like Montgomery and Prattville.

“This is very important to the community because the community needed urgent care for years,” Namburu said. “It’s not going to affect the hospital. We’re going to bring all of the people who are leaving out of town to get medical care somewhere, we’re going to bring all of our people back here and we’re going to provide good medical care.”

Namburu also said urgent care will help by allowing patients to come in without having an appointment.

“There are no appointments required and you can just walk in. My goal is that I want to have the patients in and out within an hour,” Namburu said. “We have an urgent care in Montgomery and we are doing that within an hour.”

Probate judge and chairman of the Dallas County Commission Kim Ballard, said he’s glad Namburu has stepped up to provide such a valuable service to the community, and urgent care will help residents and the local economy.

“They know they’ll have to wait if they go to a doctor’s office here or an emergency room here, therefore they’re taking their money to other towns and spending it on care there,” Ballard said. “It doesn’t stop there because when a person goes to Prattville for medical care, it’s likely they’re going to buy gas there, they’re going to eat over there and they’re going to shop over there. So this will cause people not to feel like they’re being forced to go out of town for that care.”