The Benefits Of Urgent Care In The United States

All throughout the United States, urgent care clinics are serving as many as 89 million people over the course of a single year. This means that as many as three million people go to an urgent care clinic over the course of just one single week. Because of this demand, the number of doctors employed at these urgent care clinics has also climbed, currently sitting at around 20,000 throughout the country – but in the years that are ahead of us, all of these numbers are only likely to keep climbing.

But why is this the case? Why have urgent care locations become so very important? For one thing, going to urgent care clinics is going to take you much less time than finding other forms of medical care when you are not able to get in to see your typical primary care physician. Going to a local emergency room for minor medical help, for instance, is likely to waste hours out of your day. As a matter of fact, you can expect to wait an hour, if not longer, before ever seeing any medical professional at all. And even once you have gotten a bed, you’ll have to wait longer not just for treatment and testing, but for the results of that treatment and testing as well.

But urgent care clinics can provide a viable alternative to the emergency room (for non-emergency medical situations, of course), as more than 80% of them (around 85%, to be just a bit more specific) of all urgent care clinics are actually open every single day of the week. And the wait time for these walk in clinics is really very low – at least in comparison to the wait time in just about any given emergency room out there. The data that has been gathered on the subject even more thoroughly supports this claim. This data shows that nearly three quarters of all patients attending a walk in clinic will actually only wait around 20 minutes in total. It is not uncommon for patients of urgent care clinics to come in, get the walk in medical services that they need, and leave – all within the span of just one single hour.

And urgent care clinics can provide a considerable variety when it comes to urgent care treatment and the urgent care services that are available. For instance, urgent care clinics can even treat sunburn cases. And sunburn cases are likely to be more common than one realizes, especially during the summer months. But, after all, a sunburn can begin to set in after only just 15 minutes of unprotected exposure to the sun. And when you’re out having a good time and not thinking about your skin, it can be surprising how quickly a sunburn becomes quite serious indeed.

Other injuries can also be treated in walk in health clinics. Sports injuries of many kinds are common, especially since up to 80% of all urgent care clinics are actually able to treat minor fracture cases. This means that countless people are able to save money by going to an urgent care facility instead of to their nearest hospital emergency room. And with as many as 25,000 people sustaining ankle sprains on a daily basis, testing for potential fractures has become more necessary than ever.

Of course, various illnesses also make up many of the cases seen in the urgent care clinics that have become so prominent here in the United States. For instance, urinary tract infections are painful, but commonplace, with as many as eight million cases being diagnosed over a yearly period of time. Most of these cases will be seen in adult women, as the anatomy of the female body lends itself to UTIs much more than a man’s anatomy does. Thanks to this, the average woman is up to 30 times more likely to sustain a UTI than the average man is. Fortunately, a UTI can typically be treated with a round of antibiotics, especially if the UTI is not part of a regular pattern (for which specialist care might become necessary).

At the end of the day, urgent care clinics provide a tremendous resource for a great many people in America.