Last Sunday, Richard and Kathy Margolis hosted a wine-tasting fundraiser for Malibu Urgent Care Center on the grounds of their Malibu Colony home. The event was organized by Helene Eisenberg, president of the nonprofit Friends of Malibu Urgent Care Center, which raises money to purchase new state-of-the-art medical and lab equipment, replace expiring medical supplies, and keep the place running in general. Just last year, it paid for the entire renovation of the 60-year-old building.
Malibu Urgent Care opened its doors 25 years ago and has been tirelessly serving the community ever since. Two of the emergency room certified physicians have worked there the entire time—David Frankle, MD and Jill Furgurson, MD. Just over two years ago, Furgurson’s daughter Lauren Pike, also a board certified ER doctor, joined the team.
Those attending the fundraiser were big fans of Malibu Urgent Care who have been going to the facility for years and were on a first-name basis with the long-time doctors that they now know so well. Several talked to The Malibu Times about how greatly they’d been helped there as patients, with everything from a badly injured foot to recurring infections. And they like the peace of mind of knowing it’s there—they have a place to go if something happens after normal office hours or over the weekend.
Furgurson said in an interview that she had previously worked as an ER doctor at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. When the hospital had to close for repairs after the 1993 Northridge Earthquake, she was able to find employment at Malibu Urgent Care just as it was opening, and never looked back.
Pike, recently married and expecting a baby, said she grew up with Malibu Urgent Care.
“It’s my mom’s baby, and I grew up with it almost as part of my family,” she described. “I worked in the front office at the age of 15, and that’s when I fell in love with medicine. Before that, I thought I wanted to be an architect.”
Doctors Furgurson and Frankle both said how deeply grateful they were to the community for their support.
“If not for Friends of Malibu Urgent Care, I don’t think we’d still be here,” Ferguson said. “Sometimes, I can barely manage to pay my share of the rent and worker’s compensation.”
Both senior doctors said it had become increasingly difficult financially in the past 10 years to run a medical practice with patient medical insurance reimbursements becoming less and less. They thanked the community for the contributions that allow them to continue running a quality operation.