Seeking medical care from a licensed and skilled medical professional might seem like an easy thing to do here in the United States, but all too often, the opposite is true. Finding the right venue to see a medical professional at can prove to be quite difficult indeed. For instance, the average general care practitioner is likely to be closed in the evenings, as well as during weekends and major holidays. If you develop a health problem and need medical treatment in that time, many people feel that their only option is to go to the emergency room.
However, the emergency room can also be less than ideal. For one thing, emergency room visits are incredibly time consuming. If you present with a non emergency case, you can expect to sit in the waiting room for at least a full hour before you’re ever seen by any kind of medical professional. Even then, the average ER patient likely still has a considerable amount of time to kill before they are treated and sent on their way, especially, again, if their case and their symptoms are not considered to be particularly emergent.
The average emergency room is also quite costly as well, especially if you don’t have any form of medical insurance – as is the case for far too many people. In fact, it’s unlikely that you’ll end up paying any less than $500. In many cases, the total cost will come out to be more than $1,000 – sometimes even significantly more, at that. For many people, this can mean the beginnings of what amounts to be crippling medical debt.
For such people, urgent care centers are likely to be far more ideal for the vast majority of all medical cases here in the United States – especially when the general care practitioner’s office is not open. After all, these urgent care locations are more prevalent than ever before, with more than 7,300 of them scattered about the country as of the year of 2016. In the years that have transpired since, this number is only likely to have continued to have grown. And up to more than a quarter of the population (around 27%, to be just a little bit more exact) has been to visit an urgent care center at least once over the course of the last couple of years or so.
But why an urgent care center instead of a hospital emergency room or even a general care doctor’s office? For one thing, the medical treatment provided by any given medical professional is likely to still be quite high in quality even if it is received in an urgent care location. In fact, there are up to 20,000 such medical professionals employed at urgent care locations all throughout the country, and each medical professional in question is able to provide a high quality of care to all of the patients that she or he sees.
For instance, as much as 80% of all urgent care centers can actually provide fracture care at the hands of a comprehensive medical professional. In addition to this, nearly three quarters of all urgent care locations will be able to provide IV fluids as well. In fact, the care provided by many a medical professional at urgent care locations throughout the country is so comprehensive and high quality that only a scant 3% of all cases seen in urgent care locations will need to ultimately be transferred for care in an emergency room setting. Conversely, it has been found that as many as 65% of all cases seen in any given emergency room would have been able to be quite easily treated at the local urgent care center instead of the hospital ER.
At the end of the day, finding medical care at the hands of a trusted and comprehensive medical professional can be quite difficult indeed, especially here in the United States. However, urgent care centers located all throughout the country are providing more of a venue for such care than has ever been possible before, allowing all people to get the medical care and treatments that they very much need.
