When your doctor’s office is closed for the evening, the weekend, or the holiday, getting the right medical care can be quite difficult indeed. After all, going to the emergency room is typically far from ideal, to say the very least. For one thing, the emergency room is costly, with even a visit for a minor medical concern costing you more than $1,000 on average. For those who are uninsured, the costs of this are likely to be even higher, quite considerably so indeed.
In addition to this, going to an emergency room for issues that do not qualify as a medical emergency is simply likely to waste your time as well. While you will eventually get treatment for your concerns, you will have to wait a very long time to receive it. Just sitting in the waiting room alone can cost you up to an hour of your time, if not even longer. Even after you have gotten a bed, a great deal of waiting will ensue between sporadic interactions with the medical professionals on the floor. After all, far too many emergency rooms found throughout the United States are woefully understaffed, the doctors and nurses and other medical professionals working there ending up hugely overworked as well.
Fortunately, recent years have brought about a number of viable alternatives to emergency room care, provided that the condition you are looking to treat is not in need of emergency medical help. For one thing, many a doctor’s office is simply providing extended hours. In fact, up to 40% of all general care practitioners now work in the evenings and at least for some hours on each weekend, providing convenient medical care for those who are in need of it.
In addition to this, the rise of the virtual doctor has also become quite significant indeed. People are warming up to the ideal of such an online doctor, at least for helping them to decide whether more urgent medical care is needed. And there are some things that make it all the more likely that people will feel comfortable seeking out the aid of such an on-demand doctor through a virtual platform. For instance, if such online doctors are able to access the medical records of their patients, more than half of all people will feel better about utilizing one, as they feel access to these records and information about overall medical history is quite critical to making any kind of informed medical decision in the first place. More and more private practices are also setting up such systems for when their practice is closed so that they can still help those that are in need of medical advice – and more than half of all patients have even stated that they would be willing to utilize such a system, as they would be able to work through doctors that they already knew and were comfortable with.
Of course, the local 24 hour urgent care center is also likely to provide a good deal of high quality medical care. After all, the 24 hour urgent care center is now a staple in many a community, with 24 hour urgent care centers seen all throughout the United States in its entirety, each year bringing new 24 hour urgent care clinics into being. A 24 hour urgent care center can provide the same kind of on-demand care as an emergency room, but there are many benefits to choosing a 24 hour urgent care center instead.
At a 24 hour urgent care clinic, for example, you will only have an average wait time of a mere half of an hour. In more than half of all urgent care clinics, including 24 hour urgent care clinics, you will even be lucky enough to experience an average wait time of only just 15 minutes. This allows the average 24 hour urgent care patient to get in and out all within the span of just one hour, something that is basically unheard of for any given emergency room, no matter how minor a complaint you take to be seen. Ultimately, choosing a 24 hour urgent care clinic is the better choice for many a reason.