There is no doubt about it that going to the doctor is an expensive thing, especially if you live in the United States. It also often requires you to take time off of work or even off school, as most doctor’s offices, particularly primary care physicians, are only open during typical work hours. For those who work busy schedules and are not easily able to take the time off of work, this can present a huge roadblock to getting the medical care that they need. It also presents a roadblock to those Americans who are currently without health insurance. For these reasons, many non emergent patients end up in the emergency room, which is often exorbitantly expensive and carries extensive wait times – especially if it is a relatively minor condition or injury that you are waiting to have seen.
Fortunately, the growth of urgent care clinics in the United States is helping to provide a viable option for medical treatment for all different types of people. The typical urgent care clinic is becoming more and more popular, and many places in the United States now have at least one urgent care clinic, if not even more than one urgent care clinic. Altogether, urgent care locations now employ as many as twenty thousand licensed and registered doctors and even more other such medical professionals, and these medical professionals treat an estimated three million women over the course of a single week, a number that has stayed consistent, if not grown, over the course of the recent years that have passed.
Urgent care facilities are also ideal because of their hours of operation – typically all seven days of the week and earlier in the morning and later in the evening than more traditional medical centers will be open. They also have much reduced wait times in comparison to the emergency room. Whereas you are lucky if you wait for less than a full hour in any given emergency room in the United States, more than half of all urgent care centers will actually have an average wait time of fifteen minutes or less. Many people spend hours upon hours waiting for treatment in emergency rooms, but the typical urgent care clinic will have you in and out within the time span of just one hour. Not to mention that the typical urgent care clinic is much less expensive than the emergency room as well. Where in an emergency room you are likely to pay more than one thousand dollars in total, an urgent care clinic is likely to charge you less than two hundred dollars, even if you do not have medical insurance.
The average urgent care clinic is also able to treat a wider array of conditions than many people realize. For instance, an urgent care clinic can treat ankle sprains of all varieties and severities – and see many of them, as an estimated total of twenty five thousand ankle sprains happen in the United States alone each and every day. But as many as eighty percent of all urgent care locations in the United States can provide fracture care as well, meaning that four out of every five urgent care clinics will not only have the medical technology to diagnose your potential fracture, but will be able to comprehensively treat it as well. Other conditions are also often seen in the typical urgent care clinic, such as the upper respiratory infection, which is actually the most common illness seen in any given urgent care clinic (the most common injuries often involves wound repair). Aside from these treatments, diagnosis of conditions like the flu, which can infect up to twenty percent of the population of the United States during any flu season (depending on the severity of the season). Antiviral treatments can often be given in the early stages of the flu, and these can help to lessen the severity of the symptoms by a considerable margin.
The urgent care clinic is an important installation, especially in the United States. This is because urgent cares around the country are helping bring medical care to those who need it.
