If you’ve gone to an emergency room at any time in the past, you likely know many of the problems that patients face in such a medical setting. While of course emergency rooms are ideal and necessary for true medical emergencies, going to your local emergency room for a lesser medical concern or complaint can be far from ideal at the end fo the day – and this is the case for a number of different reasons.
For one thing, emergency rooms are often overcrowded and understaffed, with doctors spreading themselves as thin as is possible to meet the needs of all of their patients. For the typical non-emergent patient in any given emergency room throughout the country, an hour’s wait or more is to be expected. The typical patient will also likely need to wait considerably longer as tests are taken and the results are processed, a process that, in and of itself, can be hugely time consuming.
Emergency room visits can be prohibitively expensive as well, leading many people to simply just avoid all medical treatment rather than be subjected to such fines. After all, a typical emergency fee is not unlikely to top out at over $1,000 – $500 at the very, very least. Even for those who have decent medical insurance, paying hospital bills can prove hugely difficult and many such bills must be paid off over a truly significant period of time.
But the best urgent care centers can provide a viable alternative to emergency room stays. The best urgent care centers, after all, are becoming more and more commonplace with each passing year. Nowadays, there are considerably more than 7,000 of them all throughout the country, marking a growth of nearly 6,000 new urgent care locations and medical clinics over the course of just one single year alone.
And the best urgent care centers provide much more ideal wait times than the typical emergency room, with up to 90% of these best urgent care locations offering an average wait time that doesn’t even exceed 30 minutes. Some urgent care clinics – up to around 60% of them, as a matter of fact – don’t even have average wait times that long. These best urgent care clinics tend to have wait times as short as 15 minutes, allowing a patient to get in, be seen, and get out all within the span of just one hour, something that would likely be purely unthinkable in the typical emergency room, even under the very best of circumstances.
And the best urgent care centers can provide the same standard of emergency care that the typical emergency room would, dealing with everything from injuries to difficulty breathing for unknown causes. In fact, the data gathered on the subject backs this up, showing that less than 5% of all cases handled in the best urgent care locations will ever need to be transported to a hospital setting, while up to 65% of all emergency room cases could easily have be handled and thoroughly treated at the nearest best urgent care center instead, something that would likely have saved the patients in question a considerable amount of time and money both.
After all, the data shows that up to 80% of all urgent care centers can not only diagnose fractures, but treat them as well. These are the very best urgent care locations, of course, and they are more common than one might realize, as many are likely to have been surprised even just by this statistic directly above. After all, up to 70% of the best urgent care centers can also even administer IV fluids, saving a dehydrated patient from the costs and wasted time of an emergency room visit, especially if dehydration is really their only complaint.
For many people, the best urgent care centers are a far better choice than the local emergency room for all the reasons that are listed above and more. After all, the best urgent care locations provide top of the line urgent care, for various injuries and illnesses alike. And urgent care centers are highly accessible, now more than ever before in the U.S.