Seeking medical care here in the United States is not always an easy thing to do. From paying for said medical care to finding time to get an appointment with your doctor, it can even feel to be near impossible. And for those without insurance, the emergency room might seem to be the only solution presented to them.
But going to the emergency room is far from ideal. For one, the wait times are exorbitantly long. The average emergency wait has now risen to be nearly an hour long, just a hair over fifty eight minutes – but it is also not uncommon to wait longer. And once you are checked in by a nurse and given a bed, you will wait still longer to see a doctor, still longer for any tests that they might want to conduct, still longer for the results of those tests and to be given the next steps in your care.
On top of this, emergency rooms are incredibly expensive. While true emergencies should of course be taken directly to the nearest emergency room location, many people will simply avoid medical treatment altogether just to avoid the emergency room bill. After all, it frequently exceeds one thousand dollars, even if you have just visited the emergency room with what could be considered a relatively mild medical concern.
Fortunately, the medical clinic has begun to present a viable option to the emergency room and even to the typical general care practitioner’s office. In fact, urgent care locations all throughout the country see as many as three million patients over the course of a single week and currently boast about twenty thousand doctors in their employ. And urgent care center locations and medical clinic locations can treat just about just everything that an emergency room could, sending only about three percent of all cases from the medical clinic to the nearest emergency center – and up to sixty five percent of emergency room cases could easily have been seen in the nearest urgent care facility instead.
This is because the typical medical clinic offers a far greater array of medical services than the average person realizes. In fact, the typical medical clinic will even offer fracture diagnosis and care (about eighty percent of them have the facilities to do so at the current date). Ankle sprains, of which up to twenty five thousand occur over the span of just one day, are often also seen in walk in urgent care locations.
Of course, the more minor aches and pains are ideal for the medical clinic as well. For instance, if your child has a cold you want checked out, a local medical clinic is likely the place to go. As the normal and otherwise healthy child will get anywhere from six to ten colds over the course of just one year, bringing them into their pediatrician’s office every time they get one can be more than the average person can schedule in – or pay for.
Common infections can also be treated in any given urgent care center. Over eight million urinary tract infections (most commonly known as UTIs) are diagnosed in the United States alone in just one year, and antibiotics can easily be prescribed in a medical clinic. Of course, the same is true for ear infections, a common affliction of young children, whose skull shape makes them particularly susceptible to the brewing of said infection after even just a common head cold.
And the benefits of going to a medical clinic instead of to the emergency room are great. The average wait time, for one, is greatly reduced. In the vast majority of all urgent care centers throughout the country – more than ninety percent of them – the wait time remains at less than thirty minutes and hardly ever exceeds it. For more than fifty percent of urgent care centers (sixty percent, to be more exact) the wait time is only, on average, about fifteen minutes long.
The medical clinic provides accessible medical care to all those who are in need of it, making it an important medical staple all throughout the United States.
