The medical walk in clinic is growing here in the United States and for a number of valid reasons. With more than three million people going to various walk in clinics and urgent care centers each and every week all throughout the country, the prevalence of the medical walk in clinic – as well as the need for said medical walk in clinic – is growing at a faster rate than ever before.
This article, though brief, will present to you three reasons why you should frequent your local medical walk in clinic instead of the emergency room or even your primary care physician. While this list is certainly far from exhaustive, it will provide a range of compelling reasons to be seriously considered the next time that you are in need of medical care. There’s no doubt about it that, with a projected need for more than fifty thousand medical professionals in the next seven years, that urgent care centers and the medical walk in clinic are more in demand than ever before.
1. The wait times
Going to your local emergency room is no one’s ideal of a good time. The emergency room is often incredibly crowded and if you have gone to one with a medical concern that is not life threatening, it is likely that you’ll end up in the waiting room for quite some time. In fact, the average wait time before being seen by a doctor in any given emergency room in the United States now exceeds fifty eight minutes, meaning that you are more than likely to spend an hour of your time simply waiting before you ever receive medical attention – and sometimes these wait times are even longer, even more extreme.
In a medical walk in clinic, on the other hand, things are much different. In such a location as a mobile health clinic or urgent care facility, it is likely that you will wait for less than half of an hour, as up to sixty percent of all such urgent care facilities throughout the country only have wait times of fifteen minutes or less. In fact, you are likely to be seen, treated, and out the door by the time that you hit the one hour mark since first walking into said medical walk in clinic.
2. The cost
There’s no doubt about it that medical care can be exorbitantly expensive, even if you have insurance. For those without insurance, finding the medical care that they are able to afford can feel like a near impossible thing. Of course, emergency rooms all throughout the country must take patients regardless of whether or not they are insured. However, the costs of the typical emergency room can be immense, often more than one thousand dollars and, on average, more than five hundred, even for the most basic of medical services provided.
Going to a medical walk in clinic is a whole different story and will typically not cost you more than three hundred dollars out of pocket. And it has been estimated that the typical medical walk in clinic can treat just about anything that the emergency room can, with only less than five percent of all cases (around three percent, to be more exact) needing a transfer to a hospital setting.
3. The range of care
As mentioned directly above, the typical medical walk in clinic can provide a vast array of services. In fact, up to eighty percent of such urgent care centers are even able to provide fracture diagnosis and care. And many more can treat other injuries such as sprained ankles, of which at least twenty five thousand occur each and every day in the United States alone.
Illnesses are also able to be diagnosed and often treated. For instance, the flu is an incredibly common one seen in urgent care centers all throughout the country, as up to twenty percent of the entire population is likely to contract the flu during the entire range of flu season. And though the flu is viral, it is a virus that can be lessened in severity if anti virals are administered shortly after symptoms first develop.
