When your doctor’s office is closed for the night or for the weekend or simply just happened opened up yet in the morning, it can be difficult to know how to handle any medical needs that arise during this time. In some cases, simply seeking out a doctor’s call line to ask for medical advice, such as how to lower a fever or treat a minor wound, is more than enough, providing you with the medical feedback you need to apply the proper treatment to yourself or even to someone else. However, this is not always the case.
Far too often, people with non-emergent medical needs wind up in the emergency room, contributing to crowding and wait times that sometimes extend past an hour, sometimes quite significantly so. For many people, going the emergency room is far from ideal not only for this reason, but for the reason of cost as well. Here in the United States, a typical emergency room visit will cost you at least $500, if not $1,000 or even more – even for minor medical problems.
Fortunately, pediatric urgent care near me and other types of urgent care centers have become more widespread than ever before all throughout the United States. In fact, urgent care locations such as a pediatric urgent care near me and other urgent care locations often see a collective three million patients over the course of just one week. At the current date and time that this article was written, as many as 20,000 doctors were employed, a number that is only expected to rise in the years that are to come.
But why go to a pediatric urgent care near me and not a hospital when you find that your child needs medical care? For one thing, the typical pediatric urgent care near me will be able to treat almost everything that a hospital could treat, though truly emergent cases should still visit their local emergency room. In fact, the typical pediatric urgent care near me will ultimately need to send less than 5% of its patients to an emergency room but could, conversely, treat as many as 65% of all cases that are seen in an emergency room instead.
After all, as many as 80% of all urgent care locations are able to provide some level of fracture diagnosis and care, and up to 70% of all urgent care centers (such has any given pediatric urgent care near me) can provide IV fluids to dehydrated patients who are in need of them. Other relatively minor injuries can also be treated at the typical pediatric urgent care near me or any other type of urgent care center – and this is certainly a good thing, too, as up to 25,000 ankle sprains will occur over the course of just one day here in the United States alone.
Ordinary illnesses will also be able to be assessed properly at your local pediatric urgent care near me or family urgent care center. The common cold, for instance, is likely to be seen in abundance in medical spaces all throughout any given year, with as many as one million of them occurring in that same span of time. Children tend to bear the brunt of it, with healthy children still contracting as many as ten colds over a year – and typically no less than six, while adults usually only get three or four, though this will most definitely vary from adult to adult.
Ear infections are another common ailment seen with regularity at the typical pediatric urgent care near me. After all, far more than half of all kids (around 80% of them, to be just a little bit more exact) will actually contract at least one ear infection by the time that they reach their third birthday. In addition to this, nearly half (around 40%) will have had at least three separate ear infections, if not even more of them, by the time that they reach this pivotal age. Thankfully, ear infections can be treated with a course of antibiotics.
