Sansum Clinic Hitchcock Urgent Care & Pediatrics

I’ve had to go to this Urgent Care twice. The wait lasted about an hour and I was very pleased with the medical attention I received. It is far cheaper than the emergency room at Cottage Hospital and it allows one to stay in the Sansum system. Cottage Hospital has received some bad marks for services from a hospital review site and I’ve had bad experiences there, so I am glad there is another alternative available in Santa Barbara.

Wow! This place is f*cking unbelievable. I got to the clinic before noon, and FOUR hours later I’m still waiting to be seen! They close at 7 PM today so I can expect to be seen in the next 3 hours or maybe they will tell me to come back on Monday! How do Insurance Companies, Hospitals and Clinics get away with this kind of service? After 4 hours of waiting, they should be PAYING ME to sit on my a$$ around all these coughing people!
I would give them 0 starts if I could!

Sansum Urgent Clinic at Hitchcock is fantastic. If you are sick and get there before they open you can be seen very quickly. The very skilled doctors and nurses are excellent. I’m am always so pleased with care the I or my family members receive.

My husband and I started taking our twins to Dr. Black after hearing good things about him (and that he is a dad of twins). Dr. Black is wonderful. Takes his time with us, answers all of our questions, is incredibly calm and supportive. I just wish he was in a practice outside of Sansum.
The front desk staff has been consistently rude, unhelpful, and condescending. They don’t acknowledge you when you walk in and are standing right in front of you. They complain loudly about other patients. They make you do tons of paperwork (often that you have done before) and offer no opportunity for you to do the paperwork in advance or after your visit (we have twins, we don’t have free hands/​attention for tons of paperwork). There are more than enough people at the front but they can’t seem to streamline their process at all. I really can’t warn you enough about what you are likely to encounter from the front desk. I really wish they would get their act together because we want to stay with Dr. Black.

This place is an absolute joke, they probably have 2 doctors trying to get through 100 patients, underquoting people 2+ hours and just saying «I’m sorry we are just backed up today» at least quote people the right amount of time 4+ hours seems to be the wait every time I’ve been here. Crazy crazy crazy, the system is flawed! Come here only if you want to waste your entire day and get even sicker in the process. Get it together Sansum, you’re ridiculous

The staff, nurses and Doctors are very nice here… when they see you. It’s seems that they are tremendously under staffed or unorganized. I have been waiting for almost two hours to see a doctor. I got here shortly after they opened their doors and there wasn’t many people here. I’m kind of confused, maybe I was lost in the shuffle?

If it’s really urgent you might want to go elsewhere. Going on three hours now and no real window into when. Add to this the charm that no one can give you any updates on when you’ll actually see a doc. The staff are friendly enough but as with all things medical, customer service is a minimal priority.

I was told one hour & it’s now been almost five– I would have gone to the ER of i had known how slow It is here here. The staff said it would be less then an hour but I waited 2 hours to get triaged & handed a beeper just to wait another 2.5 for the beeper to go off then sitting for 45 plus mins this is crazy nothing urgent about this place– Sansum isn’t what is was in my childhood I won’t come back here again

Like a previous reviewer said I’d like to give this place more stars. The staff is great but there never seems to be enough doctors on site. 2 – 3 hrs wait — Nothing «urgent» going on here…

Go there to
catch something!’(but be prepared to wait an hour or two)

Being sick sucks, but thank goodness for this place!
Came here for a flu that wouldn’t quit. I was seen by the nurse for vitals about 10 minutes after I checked in. The front desk staff and nurse were excellent. When I was with the nurse, she asked me if I would like a pager to alert me when I would be seen by the doctor. The pager is good for a 10 mile radius and they ask you come back to the clinic 15 minutes after they page you. Luckily, I live 10 minutes down the road so I of course jumped on the chance to wait for the doctor at home. The pager worked wonderfully and 10 minutes after I arrived back at the clinic I was seen by the doctor.
He was very informative, had good bedside manner, provided me with a quick assessment, and prescribed the right medication to help me feel a thousand percent better.
No one ever wants to visit the urgent care, but if you have to this is the place to come.
I’m docking one star for cleanliness. My exam room was a little dingy.
Where I’m from, it’s common to wait in urgent care for 5 – 7 hours. First off, yes, we know «urgent» care usually isn’t urgent and yes, the wait time for this place is long, but there are a lot sick/​injured people in Santa Barbara who need medical attention, so please have realistic expectations about waiting a few hours for good medical care.
Bottom line: if you’re sick, feel better and come here. You won’t regret it. By far the best urgent care experience I’ve ever had! And if you don’t live close enough to use their amazing pager system, the waiting room is comfortable and clean. Bring a pillow and some books. You’ll soon be seen by a great, caring doctor and on your way to recovery.

I adore my children’s doctor, she listens to me, and addresses my concerns. I adore the nurses, they always are upbeat and remember every patient. But the receptionists, and Sansum in general, are terrible.
The receptionists are rude, and seem unhappy, by and large. They will openly complain about calls they are getting from concerned parents when you are right there at the counter checking in. They roll their eyes, they sigh, they really just seem to not want to be there and to find everyone annoying.
If you do not schedule a check up MONTHS (not an exaggeration) in advance, it’s not going to happen. At this point, my child’s annual is several months after her birthday, and the appointment gets later every year. This will never change: it has to be a year and a day after the last appointment.
If you need to make an appointment for something you are concerned about, but is not urgent, you are going to wait at least 2 weeks for an appointment, at which point the matter MAY be very urgent. Sansum’s answer is always that you can use Urgent Care, where you are either told by the attending physician that you really should be taking your child to their primary doctor, or your child is misdiagnosed/​given the wrong dosage of medicine/​prescriptions are not sent in and they wont give you a paper script (all of these have happened several times with my children… pretty scary).
Add to this the questionable decision to put Pediatrics in the same building (as in they have only one door, one bathroom, and an adjoining waiting room which overflows into the children’s) with a walk in clinic where some of the patients have severe illnesses, and it’s pretty off-​putting.
Sansum’s business model appears to be pack in as many patients as possible, to the benefit of their pockets and absolutely no one else. It’s regrettable, as the doctors themselves are great.

Like the ER, the service is only quick if you appear likely to expire on the floor while you wait. They claim to operate on a first come first served basis, but coming in looking relatively healthy will get you perpetually bumped to the back of the line.
I went in with a potentially infected animal bite and was told to expect a wait of at least an hour. Two hours later I was told to continue to expect to wait at least another hour. There was standing room only in the waiting room and they appeared to be seeing one patient per hour. Eventually I had to leave for work. Tomorrow I will return with my now definitely infected animal bite and attempt to see a doctor before I end up in the ER. The ER may be more expensive, but I’ve definitely spent less time waiting there.

I went today to have my sore throat and cough checked before I travel. I hardly waited at all before they took me back and got my vitals, then they gave me a pager so I could wait at home to see the doctor. Pager went off, I returned to the clinic, got in to see the doc in less than 10 minutes. Dr. Yee was great, fixed me right up and I was on my way in no time. I had expected the whole thing to be an ordeal but it definitely was not!

I want to give this place more stars, I really do! I like the people who work the desk. The Doctors and the PA’s are wonderful. They care about their patients, they really do!
I have been there twice in the past couple of weeks. The first time was for a sore knee, saw a Dr. Stern and she was great! The second time was for Bronchitis that I caught in the waiting room from my previous visit.
They have made an effort to make the wait more tolerable. On Saturdays it opens at 9:00am and at 8:30 they put out a «take a number» machine. Kind of like Baskin Robbins or a Deli. Once you have a number you are free to go and come back. I wish they would put it out half an hour earlier so you wouldn’t have to wait at all!
My biggest beef is that the last time I went there was a sign, «1−1 ½ hour wait» I checked and they gave me a pager, much like Brophy’s. Again, in theory a great idea. I left to get a bite of lunch at Natural Café down the road. Showed up an hour and a half later, pager not having gone off. The bottom line is that the wait was almost THREE hours! Even people who’s pagers had gone off had to wait an additional hour.

this place is the worst ever!!! walked in with a wait time of 1 hour. they changed it to 3 hours with out notifying anyone in the waiting room. if they have u a buzzer and tell u to leave don’t do it. once u get back you still have to wait 30 minutes. don’t waste your time! spend the money and go to the ER

Awful patient care, call it no care in pediatric department. Can never get in touch with pediatric MD for my child, walk in with a fever for a 5yr old over 100 °F and nurse goes sorry we are done for the day at 11.30am. Walk into their urgent care department in their same waiting area and their wait time average 2 hours, still waiting and there are only 4 people waiting here. Wish we had more options in Santa Barbara!

I’ve been this facility… Sadly several times… In the last few months. I found the staff to be friendly, upbeat, and professional despite a very fast-​moving environment. They clearly see a lot of people in a given day here and the doctors have a lot of experience. For someone doesn’t really have an serious emergency this is way better than ER.

I just moved to CA and have a recurring back problem. I finally got my insurance established and attempted to make an appointment with my assigned dr. Luckily they had an appointment to see me right away, in OCTOBER. So I decided to go to urgent care because my Sciatica and back were feeling horrible. I arrived at urgent care approximately 30 minutes before they close. There was about 7 people waiting, so the whole process from checking in to leaving took about an hour. My wait was probably about 15 minutes to be received by a wonderful man who was very funny and made me feel at ease.
Then I saw Dr. Richardson and he was so helpful. I told him my issues and was really hoping for a way to manage the pain until I could see my dr for referrals, but he was able to refer me to physical therapy and a rheumatologist to get the ball rolling on the treatment I need to hopefully get my back to 100%.
I really enjoyed my experience here and would recommend it fully.

I went in on a Friday at about 1:00 with strep throat didn’t get out of there until 5:00. They ran a urinalysis for what reason I don’t know. When results came back negative they told me I had a virus and sent me on my way with nothing! The symptoms continued to worsen so I went back in Sunday, this time with my husband to help ensure they actually listened to my complaints. They finally did a throat culture and put me on medication. So disgusted! It shouldn’t take two visits to get treated for strep throat!!!