Telephone Policy

Routine Telephone Calls

Heartland Women’s Health Care has live operators to answer your call.  Our operators will schedule your appointment or route your call to the person who can best help you.  If a message has to be taken, every effort will be made to return your call within a few hours.  Please leave the phone number or numbers where you may be reached during the day.  HWHC receives a very large volume of calls daily.  Your call will be prioritized and handled based on that priority.  The physicians are very busy while seeing patients and it may take a while to have your concerns addressed.

Keep in mind that you must remove or disable all caller call blockers on your telephone in order to receive a reply from our staff or physicians during all hours.

Urgent/Emergent Calls

If you need to contact a physician when our office is closed (after office hours, holidays or weekends), please call our main number at 816.452.3300. Our answering service will take your information and page the physician on call. If you have not received a call returned to you within 20 minutes, you may have the doctor re-paged. If it is a true emergency and requires immediate attention, go to your nearest Emergency Room or Labor & Delivery. Keep in mind our physicians only practice at North Kansas City Hospital.

We are pleased to provide urgent and emergent care during non-office hours.  Because we cannot offer the best advice or treatment options without the ability to review your medical records, examine you or order testing, we are not available to handle non-emergency matters on the telephone.  

Examples of this include the following:

1. Refill of any medications.

2. Prescriptions for:
   Birth control
   Pain medication
   Antibiotics for any reason
   Morning after pill (you have 72 hours to take this medication after unprotected intercourse)    

3. Discussion of findings from your surgical procedure performed by a physician other than the on-call physician.

4. “What can I take for…” calls during pregnancy.  This information has been provided to you in a pamphlet at your first obstetrical visit and is also available on the website under OB-FAQs.     
   

If you are 36 weeks or greater, it is not necessary to call the on-call physician if you are contracting, bleeding, or think your water is leaking.  (Refer to the yellow sheet you were given at checkout during your most recent OB visit.)  That sheet is titled “What To Do.”  This information is also available under the OB Section of our website.

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