Did you know that the average urgent care walk in clinic in the United States gets anywhere between 300 and 400 patient visits every week? These medical centers, which are designed to provide care for non-life-threatening conditions, offer patients and their communities a number of potential benefits, from convenient hours to affordable treatment. The town of Newtown, Pennsylvania in Buck’s County is one of the most recent areas to reap these advantages after acquiring their first urgent care center.
The new urgent care facility, located on South Eagle Road in Newtown, plans to service the whole of Bucks County, including local schools like Bucks County College and Holy Family University. Open 365 days a year from 9 AM to 9 PM, the urgent care clinic, like many of its type, will not require appointments and instead operate on a walk in basis. Additionally, the urgent care walk in clinic will have access to an X-ray machine, EKG and diagnostic laboratory equipment to quickly and accurately diagnose a variety of conditions. Like most urgent care centers, the Newtown location expects to offer shorter wait times while treating everything from nausea and flu symptoms to anxiety, a quality that will largely be due to these aforementioned benefits.
The Newtown urgent care location, which officially opened September 12, is merely one of the more recent additions to several thousand urgent care centers throughout the U.S., which employ an estimated 20,000 doctors in the field of urgent care medicine. As the number of potential patients in the nation increases with expanding insurance coverage, these urgent care walk in clinics and physicians have managed to help a number of hospitals and local doctors offices reduce their overwhelming patient volumes: an estimated 27% of all emergency room visits could take place at an urgent care facility. Moreover, the patients who do not require emergency room care stand to benefit both physically and financially: not only will they receive the quality care they deserve, but urgent care facilities typically charge co-pays similar to what a doctor would charge, making urgent care visits significantly less expensive than visits to the emergency room. For these reasons, its no surprise that there are as many as 160 million urgent care visits every year in the U.S., a number Bucks County, Pennsylvania will now be contributing to. Reference links.
