If you need medical help when your regular doctor’s office is closed, it can be difficult to know where to turn. You can go to a local emergency room, of course, but doing so is not always ideal – unless you are facing a true medical emergency, of course. This is due to the fact that emergency rooms typically have very long wait times. In addition to this, the care that you’ll receive in an emergency room is almost always going to be very expensive, with the average ER visit not costing more than $1,000, a number that is only likely to grow in the future. And this price is not uncommon even for relatively minor care given in such a setting.
In addition to this, you might decide to utilize a virtual doctor. Virtual medicine is becoming more and more popular here in the United States and can provide a great way to get a preliminary medical opinion. But most people are not necessarily going to feel comfortable relying on this form of medical care alone. When they have a concerning medical issue, they are more likely than not going to want to see someone in person about it, as is very reasonable to expect.
Fortunately, urgent care treatment is growing more and more popular all throughout the country. As a matter of fact, after hours urgent care clinics are becoming more and more widespread, with now more than 7,000 of them found throughout the country. And urgent care clinics like after hours urgent care centers are much more likely to be open a full week, at least in comparison to the typical doctor’s office. The data that has been gathered on the subject more than supports this claim, as it has found that up to 85% off all after hours urgent care locations are actually open each and every day of the week.
The wait times for these after hours urgent care clinics are also very impressive. In more than 70% of the cases seen in the typical after hours urgent care center, the patient in question was able to be helped after waiting no longer than 20 minutes. And up to 60% of all after hours urgent care clinics boast average waiting times of no more than even a mere 15 minutes. If you go to a local emergency room, on the other hand, you’re likely to wait at least one full hour, if not even longer than this.
And it’s not just about the wait times – standard of care matters as well. Fortunately, the standard of care provided at typical after hours urgent care centers is quite high indeed, as up to 20,000 top doctors are staffed at walk in health clinics found all throughout the United States. The skill of the typical urgent care doctor is no lesser than the skill of the typical emergency room doctor, something that is very important to note indeed.
And urgent care centers like after hours urgent care centers can treat a wider variety of medical concerns than many might realize. After all, less than 5% of all cases first seen in an urgent care setting (around 3% of them, to be just a bit more exact) will ever need to be moved to a hospital setting. On the other hand, however, more than 40% of all cases first seen in a typical emergency room would likely have been able to be adeptly treated in an after hours urgent care clinic, no matter what part of the United States you might be looking in.
Already, urgent care locations are immensely popular, treating as many as three million people over the course of just one week. In the years that are ahead of us, the prominence of the urgent care center, including the after hours urgent care center, is only likely to rise. After all, urgent care locations provide a high quality of care in a hugely convenient way. They also provide a great deal of treatment options, able to handle cases that you might not expect them to take on. The cost and time spent in an urgent care setting are also quite ideal.