For those who do not have the time to schedule a doctor’s appointment with their general practitioner or who simply just do not have health insurance, an urgent care center can provide a viable alternative to the emergency room.
Most urgent care locations are open seven days a week, with only 15% reporting that they are not. They are becoming more and more popular as well, employing around 20,000 doctors and medical professional nationally and servicing 3 million people every week. An urgent care center provides quality care without the cost or the wait time that you can expect in an emergency room. In fact, the majority of urgent care centers have an average wait time of fifteen minutes, and a typical urgent care center visit only costs around $200, compared to the costs of thousands or more in an emergency room.
An urgent care center, walk in clinic, or the like can perform a range of different services, from sports physicals to wound care and repair. Many urgent care centers can even deal with fractures, offering advanced technology and diagnostic tools like x-rays to patients who have suspected fractures or breaks. A walk in urgent care center also provides treatment for minor ailments as well, like colds (of which people in the United States get around a billion of every single year). The flu is another common ailment seen in an urgent care center, as up to 20% of the population of the United States gets the flu every year during flu season. By and large, however, the most commonly treated ailment in an urgent care center is a respiratory infection, which can develop after a particularly bad cold or the flu, though the majority of people recover from a cold in about eight to ten days.
Fortunately for those who, for whatever reason, do not have a primary care physician, urgent care centers provide high quality medical treatment for a range of issues, big and small. They can provide care for sprained ankles as well as minor fractures as well as more serious viral infections like the flu. In fact, most cases seen in the emergency room could actually have been treated in an urgent care center. Urgent care centers can save on time as well as costs and provide a viable alternative to the emergency room, particularly for uninsured patients.