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Charles Welborn

New Position: Medical director, After Hours Pediatrics, Tampa. Previous Position: Staff physician, After Hours Pediatrics, Tampa

By Times Staff Writer
Published March 21, 2005

Charles Welborn says he is a kid at heart, and that helps him relate to his youthful patients.

As a pediatric physician and now medical director at After Hours Pediatrics, Welborn will continue his clinical practice while administering the medical staff at four Tampa locations.

Welborn said he has "oversight for medical operations in terms of patient care and quality of care." He also spends part of each week meeting with other pediatric and primary care physicians throughout the Tampa Bay area "to make sure they know what our practice is about."

"We don't see ourselves in competition with them," Welborn said. "Our mission states that every child has what we call a "medical home' - a primary care physician. We're really only there when their primary care physician is unavailable to provide acute care.

"We're available as an alternative to the emergency department," he said.

The four After Hours Pediatrics clinics in Tampa see about 25,000 patients a year. There are three other clinics in Orlando that have a separate medical director, Welborn said.

Each clinic is open 50 hours a week - from 5 to 11 p.m. weekdays and from 1 to 11 p.m. weekends, 365 days a year.

Pediatric emergency room children's visits decline considerably after 11 p.m., Welborn said.

"We typically get a rush when Mom and Dad get home from work, or right after supper, and then when they put the kids to bed around 8 or 9 o'clock," he said. "The bulk of kids are noticed to be sick around 10 or 11 p.m."

Welborn grew up in Pascagoula, Miss., and attended Springhill College in Mobile, Ala., where he earned a bachelor's degree in biology and philosophy in 1976. He earned his medical degree and a master's in public health in 1980 from Tulane Medical School in New Orleans.

For the first year after graduating, Welborn worked in Malaysia on a Henry Luce Foundation grant. He returned to the United States in 1981 and completed his medical residency in pediatrics at Tulane in 1984. For the next three years, he practiced in pediatrics and taught at Tulane.

In 1987, Welborn moved to New York City as director of pediatric emergency room medicine at Harlem Hospital, where he remained for the next 16 years. In 2003, he relocated to Tampa to become a staff physician at After Hours Pediatrics.

"After 15 to 16 years running a big inner-city urban emergency room department, you get burned out after a while," Welborn said. He also said he was attracted to After Hours Pediatrics because it was "a unique concept that addressed a lot of issues that we have in pediatric emergency departments."

"A number of people who use them don't have life-threatening emergencies but need to be taken care of," he said. "This concept of taking care of kids outside of a hospital setting but with people trained in emergency medicine is a unique concept. There are only a few places around the nation that have pediatric emergency care facilities."

The clinics can attend to lacerations, take X-rays, treat broken bones. "We can take care of almost anything a regular emergency room can with the exception of major trauma," he said.

"Most kids who are sick after hours don't need that. They need somebody to see them, help them and then refer them to their primary care physician."

Why did Welborn choose to specialize in pediatrics?

"Why would I want to treat an adult?" he said. "Adults lie to you. They eat too much. They drink too much. They don't exercise enough and then they want you to fix them.

"Pediatricians at heart are kind of big kids," he said. "We like being with children. The younger they are, the easier they are to figure out.

"Adults come in and will cry and whine, and you don't know whether it's real or not," he added. "If a kid hurts, you know. If they can't verbally talk to you, then they talk to you in many other ways."

Welborn, 52, is single and lives in Tampa. Next year, he plans a trip back to Malaysia.

[Last modified March 19, 2005, 01:34:02]