Getting sick or injured is common here in the United States – and pretty much anywhere else in the world as well. Common colds occur as many as one billion times a year in the United States alone and it’s actually normal for an otherwise healthy child to get as many as ten of them per year (due to the fact that children have immune systems that are still developing). Injuries are also common, with up to twenty five thousand ankle sprains alone happening over this same span of time here in the United States.
For such minor concerns, many people do not really need to go to an emergency room location – but if you find yourself (or your children) sick or injured on a weekend or in the evening or at night, it can be difficult to find another viable option to this course. Fortunately, with up to eighty five percent of them open every single day of the week, the typical urgent care location has become an alternative to the emergency room. Many an urgent care location is even open earlier in the morning and later in to the evening than a traditional doctor’s office would be, allowing those who develop symptoms at these times (or who are simply not easily able to take time off of work) to get into see a qualified doctor without needing to go through everything that entails an emergency room visit.
And the average urgent care location is going to have qualified doctors – at least one – at all time that they are open. In fact, there are now more than twenty thousand doctors working to provide urgent care treatment at various urgent care locations all throughout the country. And the typical urgent care location is growing more popular now than ever before, with urgent care centers all throughout the country seeing as many as three million patients throughout the course of just one week.
The average wait times in urgent care centers make them far more ideal than going to an emergency room instead. In your average emergency room, the average weight is, at just over fifty eight minutes, very nearly an entire hour, with many emergency room patients experiencing even longer wait times than this. In comparison, the typical urgent care location will not have a wait time that exceeds thirty minutes. In up to sixty percent of all urgent care clinics here in the United States, the wait times will not even surpass fifteen minutes on a typical basis.
In addition to this, your local urgent care location is likely to be able to treat a wider variety of health concerns than the average person even realizes. For instance, fracture care can be provided at the vast majority of urgent care centers – up to eighty percent of them and only likely to grow in the years that are to come. In addition to this, x ray machines at urgent care centers can also be used to diagnose other conditions as well, allowing patients to avoid the extensive and exorbitant fees that often come part and parcel with hospital testing.
Other services can also be provided in just about any urgent care location throughout the country, with IV fluids able to be administered at up to seventy percent of urgent care locations at the current date. In many cases, stitches can also be provided, given that the wound they are being used to treat is not too advanced or serious, in which case hospital treatment will likely be required. However, urgent care clinics are likely able to treat more than you realize and not many of these cases end up needing to be transferred to a nearby hospital.
Actually, it is very rare for this to become the case, as recent data has shown that only around three percent of all cases seen first at an urgent care location will end up needing hospital level care and treatment. Conversely, however, up to sixty five percent of all hospital emergency room cases could have very easily been seen at a local urgent care location, a change that would save the typical patient a great deal of time as well as money, as ERs are expensive.