Unless you’ve been ignoring the news for the last decade, you’d know that American emergency rooms are struggling to keep up with the demand for their services. In general, emergency rooms should be the first choice for people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries but the last stop for those with minor conditions. That’s where urgent care facilities come in.
As Kaiser Health Health News writes, advanced urgent care centers have seen huge growth in the last decade. In fact, within a four year stretch, the number of urgent care services in the United States shot from 8,000 to 9,300. With typically lower costs, a whole range of medical services, and personnel trained to the highest standards of modern medicine, your local urgent care center makes for a smart choice — one that saves you money, while helping alleviate the pressure on American emergency departments.
Three Issues You’d Be Better off Visiting Your Local Urgent Care Center For
- Sprains and Minor Breaks
- Chronic, Non-Life-threatening Illness
- Physicals and Regular Checkups
Sprains and minor broken bones, say a stress fracture in your leg from running too much, are better treated at your local urgent care facility. Quite simply, emergency rooms have a lot bigger issues to deal with than broken toes and a sprained ankle. Unless you’ve broken a rib that’s threatening to puncture your lung or sustained a similarly egregious injury, you really ought to go to urgent care, as Fox News writes.
If you have a cold that just won’t quit or you’re tired of having headaches all the time, you should visit your local urgent care team, not your ER. As the Boston Globe writes, urgent care centers have all the medication and tools they need to help treat these minor conditions. Additionally, if they think your minor condition is a symptom of something else, they can use state-of-the-art technology onsite to better determine whether you should escalate treatment to an ER.
One of the most popular reasons to visit urgent care centers is for regular checkups and physicals. As U.S. News and World Report points out, unlike your general practitioner, your local urgent care team won’t make you wait for weeks or months for a simple cursory checkup.
Have you visited your local urgent care center? Let us know about your experiences, good or bad, in the comment section below! Get more on this here.
