If you’re looking for comprehensive medical care, consider your local urgent care center. After all, urgent care clinics are growing in popularity, servicing as many as three million people on a weekly basis. And as there are up to 20,000 different doctors employed at these urgent care centers, there is no denying that high quality medical care can be given there. Therefore, now more than one quarter of the population has attended at least one urgent care center at least once over the course of the last two years or so. In the years that are ahead, this number is only likely to grow.
This can be attributed in part to the spread of urgent care locations all throughout the country. Nowadays, more than 7,000 urgent care centers are in operation. If you look within just about any thriving community here in the United States, you are likely to see at least one urgent care center – if not even more than one urgent care center – with its doors open. And these urgent care clinics provide an array of important services that cannot always be obtained elsewhere, making the average urgent care clinic even more important for these reasons.
For one thing, the average urgent care center is able to provide effective and efficient care perfect for those who are looking to get in and out as soon as possible. After all, more than 90% of all urgent care centers currently in operation in this country have been found to have an average wait time of no more than a mere half of an hour. And for more than half of all urgent care centers – around 60% of them, to be just a bit more exact – the average wait time was only just 15 minutes at the very most. In stark comparison, on the other hand, a typical emergency room wait time will often exceed a full hour. And where the average urgent care center patient will be in and out within the span of an hour, a patient in the typical emergency room will have to wait hours upon hours before their care has been fully provided and they are able to go home.
And the standard of care provided at the typical urgent care center is often quite a bit higher than most people actually realize. After all, only around 3% of all cases first seen in any given urgent care center will ever need to be transferred to a hospital. On the other hand, up to 65% of all of the cases seen at the typical ER could have easily been treated in an urgent care center nearby, something that would have saved the patients in question a great deal of time and money alike.
And urgent care centers in the United States can treat a wide variety of conditions indeed. For one thing, they are more adept at wound care than many people realize. As a matter of fact, more than three quarters of all urgent care centers – around 80% of them, to be just a bit more specific – are actually able to treat fractures as well as diagnose them. This can save the typical patient a lot of money and time and is therefore a service that more people than you might realize seek out from an urgent care center near them. Wound repair is also common, and can range from simple bandaging to even sutures, which many an urgent care center is also able to provide.
Ultimately, there are many reasons to go to an urgent care center. For many people, going to an urgent care center has simply become the easiest and truly most convenient way to get care. For many people, it has also become the most cost effective path to care as well, something that is hugely important all throughout the country in its entirety. At the end of the day, the typical urgent care center establishment is one that is only likely to grow in the years that are to come just as the need for it is consistently on the rise all throughout the United States.