Urgent care centers can offer a great deal of medical care all throughout the country. After all, there are now well over 7,000 different urgent care locations from one coast to the next – and everywhere in between as well. Urgent care centers service as many as a full 3,000 people over the course of a week, making any given urgent care facility likely to be a successful one. With as many as 20,000 different doctors now working for urgent care locations, there is just no doubting the fact that the typical urgent care facility has become an important establishment in just about every community throughout the United States.
After all, an urgent care facility can provide readily available access to medical care that the typical general care practitioner’s office simply just cannot. For one thing, an urgent care facility is much more likely to be open during weekend hours, at least for some portion of the day. The data on the subject very much backs this up, showing that as many as 85% of all urgent care locations are able to operate to some extent during each and every day of the week. Urgent care centers are also more likely to open earlier in the day and close later into the evening than your standard private practice will. Therefore, an urgent care facility can provide a viable alternative to going to an emergency room when your typical doctor is closed for the day.
An urgent care facility is, on the whole, a much better option than your typical emergency room (though you should of course still visit an ER if you are having a true medical emergency). For one thing, the waiting period at your average urgent care facility is going to be dramatically less than what you’d find in an emergency room, where the average time to wait before seeing a doctor or even a nurse is more than an hour – sometimes far more, for that matter. At an urgent care facility, things are different. In fact, more than half of all urgent care clinics have wait times that don’t even exceed 15 minutes, on average. And more than 90% of all urgent care locations actually have less than half of an hour for an average waiting time, which is still very much quite the improvement over what you’d find in an emergency room, to say the very least on the subject matter at hand.
And urgent care facilities can provide a much broader scope of care than many people even actually realize. For one thing, more than 95% of all urgent care cases need to be transferred to a hospital location. This means that urgent care centers are more than equipped to deal with the vast majority of what comes their way. Fracture care is one great example of exactly this, as more than three quarters (around 80%, to be just a little bit more specific) of all urgent care locations are able to provide it. Treating sprained ankles is hugely commonplace as well, with as many as 25,000 sprained ankle cases seen not throughout the course of a month or even just a week, but in the span of just one single day. This goes to show just how important urgent care locations can really be.
Flu care can also be obtained at your local urgent care center. This is hugely important as up to one fifth of the American population can become infected with the flu during a particularly bad flu season. Even during more mild years, still at least 5% of the population will contract the flu. Getting an anti viral from a nearby urgent care facility is something that can help to reduce not only the duration of your illness, but its overall severity as well. By preventing the flu as much as you can with a flu shot, you help to ensure that not only is your own health more protected, but the health of everyone that you come into contact with as well. At the end of the day, even some level of protection is far better than none at all.