If you are in need of medical care, there are many reasons to choose an urgent care location. This article will discuss some of these reasons at much more depth, but there is certainly no doubt about it that the need for urgent care services is growing. In fact, such walk in clinics now serve as many as three million people over the course of a single week here in the United States, employing as many as twenty thousand doctors to do so.
One reason to go to a medical clinic is simply because such medical clinics and urgent care locations are open at hours that your standard doctor’s office will not be. Data backs this up, showing that as many as eighty five percent of all of the urgent care clinics in this country are open every single day of the week. What’s more is that more than ninety percent are opened into the evening, typically keeping doors open past seven o clock at night. Forty percent of such clinics will even stay open past nine o clock at night, a time of the evening when most people begin to view the emergency room as their only access to medical treatment and care, should they so need it.
Urgent care centers are also hugely efficient when it comes to your time. In fact, more than fifty percent of all urgent care centers (sixty percent of them, to be a little more exact) even have a standard wait time of less than fifteen minutes. And for more than ninety percent of all such medical clinics in the United States, this wait time averages to be less than thirty minutes.
Even the time that you speak with a doctor is usually very efficient, as the data gathered has found that urgent care visits tend to be effective and brief. The typical time that someone spends in any given medical center location is likely to be less than one full hour, something that holds true in as many as eighty percent of all urgent care locations.
If you go to an emergency room instead of an urgent care center, you’ll likely find that this is the furthest thing from the truth out there. In fact, emergency room wait times can be extensive, especially if you find yourself in need of essential medical treatment at a high point in the day or night. On average, the typical wait time for the emergency room very nearly reaches a full hour at fifty eight minutes – and many patients end up waiting even longer than that, though this will, of course, vary from case to case.
But some people feel hesitant to go to a medical clinic instead of a local emergency room, and this can be linked to the fact that many people simply don’t understand the depth and variety of medical services that the typical urgent care clinic here in the United States has to offer. To put it succinctly, it’s likely more than you would realize if you hadn’t visited one and seen it for yourself.
For instance, more than half of all such medical clinics – about seventy percent of them – can give you an IV if you need one. In cases of dehydration during an illness, this can be essential and can keep you out of the hospital. On top of this, fracture diagnosis and care is possible at the majority of all urgent care centers, an impressive eighty percent of them, to be more exact.
Lbr>Of course, much more routine treatments are also possible. For instance, you can go in to see if you have the flu. Though the flu cannot be cured, anti viral medications can help to reduce the severity of the flu if they are administered in the first few days of the course of the illness. And an urgent care clinic here in the United States is often able to provide just that, potentially even saving lives by doing so, as the flu is a disease that is often not taken seriously enough but many people.