Taking A Look at The Need For Urgent Care Centers All Throughout The United States
Medical care is crucial to our health, even if we don’t suspect that we have any health problems. For instance, getting a regular wellness check up is recommended by just about any and every general care practitioner out there in the United States, and you should of course go into the doctor when you are concerned over your health in anyway.
However, it’s also important to note that taking care of your health is not always so easy. For instance, general care practitioner’s office hours do not always line up with the times that you have free to go in. For such people, it becomes a choice of taking off work or not seeing a doctor at all.
The problem of affording medical care can also be difficult, such as for those who do not have health care insurance for whatever reason. For those who are uninsured, seeking medical care in the emergency room is often the only way to see a doctor when they need to. Of course, this is far from ideal for a number of reasons.
For one, it takes up a huge amount of time. It is not uncommon for hospital waiting rooms to be jam packed with people who are waiting to see a doctor and, on average, the wait time is nearly an hour long at more than fifty eight minutes long. For many other people, the wait time stretches on even longer.
And emergency rooms are incredibly expensive as well, no matter what it is that you are seeking treatment for. In fact, the typical emergency room visit can leave a person owing more than one thousand dollars – and sometimes extravagantly more than that, to boot. And for the person who is living without insurance, one thousand dollars or more is simply impossible to pay off and will take them years and years until being fully paid off.
But fortunately, urgent care centers present a viable alternative to going to the emergency room or even to your local urgent care center. And they have become incredibly popular all throughout the United States. More than twenty thousand doctors are employed at various urgent care centers throughout the country, and up to three million patients are seen. In the years that are to come, both of these numbers are projected to keep growing.
Urgent care centers not only provide accessible healthcare to just about everybody, but they also provide healthcare on a very frequent basis. In fact, the vast majority of all urgent care centers – as many as eighty five percent of them – are open every single day of the week and even on many holidays, major holidays or otherwise. Many urgent care locations are also open earlier in the morning as well as later into the evening than typical doctor’s offices would be.
And urgent care locations can treat a wide variety of conditions. If you fear that you might have an STD, it is important to get it checked out, as the typical STD is highly treatable – but usually only if that STD is noticed and treated in a timely or at least relatively timely matter. In your typical urgent care clinic, STD testing is likely to be offered for a very low cost – and some urgent care locations will even offer STD testing for free. Either way, STD testing matters and should be sought out whenever it is necessary.
Aside from STD testing and other sexual health services, urgent care centers can typical provide a great deal of treatment for wounds, from the minor to the much more severe. In fact, as many as eighty percent of all urgent care centers can effectively diagnose and treat fractures and ankle sprains – of which there are as many as twenty five thousand in just one day – are also fair game at your usual medical clinic.
If you suspect an illness such as an ear infection or strep throat, you can also be seen in your local urgent care. Respiratory problems are often commonly diagnosed in urgent care centers, as are UTIs, the flue, and even more.
