The Case For Urgent Care
Here in the United States, there is no denying that medical care is very much a necessity. From illness to injury to chronic conditions, we need our doctors very much. However, choosing the right place to get your medical care can sometimes prove to be tricky, and many people find themselves struggling to make such a decision. From cost to finding the time to make an appointment, getting to go to the doctor to seek comprehensive and convenient care can be more difficult than many people actually realize.
Fortunately, however, the average medical clinic and urgent care center is on the rise, with more than 7,000 such medical locations located all throughout the country. From cases where someone in having difficulty breathing to a minor injury, the typical medical clinic will be able to handle much of what the local emergency center can, proving such a medical clinic to be a viable alternative for urgent and emergency care.
And much of the cases treated in the average medical clinic never need to be transferred to a local emergency room. In fact, less than 5% of all cases seen by medical clinics throughout the country must later be treated in such a setting, though conversely, many emergency room patients could have easily been treated in a medical clinic setting instead. The data that has been gathered on this subject backs up this claim, showing that up to 65% of all ER cases – and no less than 44% of them, for that matter – could have instead been comprehensively treated in a medical clinic setting instead.
And as many people living throughout the country can all too readily attest to, getting treatment in a medical clinic instead of in a hospital emergency room can be ideal for a number of reasons. For one thing, emergency room wait times are often quite incredibly long indeed, requiring a non emergent patient to wait as long as an hour – on average, and sometimes even longer than that in many an emergency room throughout the country – before they are really even able to see a nurse, let alone a doctor. And if a hospital emergency room is busy, doctors and other such medical professionals are likely to be spread quite thin indeed, making going to the emergency room for even a relatively small concern an affair lasting hours at a time.
An urgent care center or medical clinic, on the other hand, is an entirely different story. In the typical urgent care center or medical clinic, the wait times aren’t long at all. In fact, more than 90% of all medical clinics and urgent care locations found throughout this country have an average wait time that does not even exceed a mere half of an hour. In addition to this, a staggering up to 60% of all urgent care clinics offer average wait times of no more than 15 minutes, which is truly even more impressive and monumental when it comes to providing fast and efficient care.
And urgent care centers can provide care for a wide variety of medical concerns. For instance, nearly three quarters of all urgent care locations can actually now provide IV fluids, something that can be hugely beneficial for patients who have become dehydrated for whatever reason. Fracture care is also quite common, with the means for such available in up to 80% of all urgent care locations in this one country alone. For many people, having a pressing medical concern treated in a place like a urgent care center or medical clinic will save not only a great deal of time, but money as well, something that will be, of course, hugely beneficial for a huge population of people struggling to meet medical costs that have been accrued.
At the end of the day, the medical clinic and average urgent care center both play an incredibly important role in providing health care here in the United States. From low costs to low wait times, there are many reasons that people will choose a local medical clinic over a local emergency room – and many reasons that they should do so, of course. In coming years, such places will only grow.