As any medical professional will easily tell you, regular medical care is hugely important for people of all ages, all genders, all races and ethnicities. With regular medical care at the hands of an experienced medical professional, you will not only be able to keep track of your health but you will likely be able to identify any health concerns and problems that you might have before they spiral out of control. In addition to this, a medical professional will also be able to perform diagnostic testing in cases of injury and sudden illness, allowing you to get the treatment that you need in order to get better as quickly as is possible.
However, getting this medical care from a qualified and experienced medical professional is not always as easy as it should be. For one thing, there simply aren’t enough doctors to go around, with more than fifty thousand new ones needed by the time that we reach the year of 2025. For many people, finding a medical professional that can take them on as a consistent patient has proven to be quite difficult.
And this is not the only problem that people face. In addition to this, finding the time to go in to see a doctor or other such medical professional can also be a very difficult thing. People have busy and often hectic lives, and taking off of work to see a doctor is not always a feasible thing for them to do, especially if they are struggling to make ends meet. For those who are without health insurance, it is often just simply out of the question.
Far too often, these people end up in emergency rooms throughout the country, often for cases that aren’t nearly severe enough to warrant a trip to such a place – but all too often, these people simply feel that they have nowhere else to go. In part because of this, the typical wait time in the average emergency room here in the United States is nearly an hour, and the cost of emergency room visits just keeps rising. But what are people to do if they can’t get in to see medical professional at the typical general care practitioner’s office?
The answer lies in urgent care. Urgent care centers provide an accessible way for all people in the United States to get medical care that they are in need of at the hands of skilled medical professionals. In fact, there are now more than twenty thousand doctors employed at various urgent care locations all throughout the country, a number that is only likely to continue to grow from year to year. In addition to this, the sheer number of urgent care centers themselves is also growing, jumping to more than seven thousand and three hundred of them by the time that the year of 2015 had drawn to a close. In the years that have passed by since, this number has only continued to increase.
But what makes urgent care centers better than emergency rooms and sometimes even better than typical doctor’s offices? For one thing, the wait time seen in these medical centers is far reduced, with more than ninety percent of them boasting a wait time that is truly no greater than a mere half of an hour. And for up to sixty percent of all urgent care locations in the United States, the typical wait time does not even exceed fifteen minutes.
In addition to this, only about three percent of all patients who seek medical treatment in an urgent care center will end up needing to be transferred to a local emergency room, clearly showing that urgent care centers in many places are highly equipped to treat even serious medical cases. Not only is the average medical professional at an urgent care location highly skilled, but said medical professional often has access to more diagnostic tools at an urgent carpenter than many people realize as well. In fact, more than seventy five percent fo all urgent care centers in the United States are even able to diagnose and treat fractures and seventy percent can start IV fluids if it’s necessary.