After a long day of work you rushed to your children, herding them into the car quickly you then rushed off to soccer practice and finally while they were on the field you got a whole twenty minuets of piece and quiet before that scream on the field echoed in your years. Being the star parents you are you knew without even turning your head that it was your child yelling out in pain on the green grass. They limp off the field, favoring one ankle over another and suddenly your day becomes even more complicated. What do you do now? Do you head to an emergency room? To sit for hours on end and not be seen while your child cries in pain and your missed work for the evening stacks up around you? Of course you don’t, you instead look for the quickest nearby pediatric urgent care and that is your first destination when leaving the game.
The thing that many parents forget is that four out of five family urgent care facilities do provide emergency care such as fracture care. Seeing that 25,000 Americans find themselves suffering from ankle sprains each day, heading to your local urgent care centers can save you quite a bit of both time and hassle than the long waits and germ infested waiting rooms that you locate in the emergency room. Most urgent care centers have a max wait time of roughly 15 minuets. Fifteen minuets to wait with a child who is hurt sounds quite a bit more enticing than being there for six hours and still not being seen by a doctor due to hordes of emergencies that the emergency room sees in an hour alone.
Studies conducted have shown that between 40%-65% of all visits that end up in the emergency room could have been treated easier for the patients within an urgent care instead. While of course, it is always safe to be safe rather than sorry, when you have a busy life and a hurt child, sometimes it is best to find urgent care nearby rather than exposing your already hurting child to the chaos of a room filled with sick people. Considering that children tend to acquire roughly ten colds every year, wouldn’t it be better to not add sickness to either one of your busy plates when their fractured or sprained bones could have been treated in less time for just the same amount of care at your local urgent care instead of enduring the wait of the emergency room?
The next time your son or daughter is hurt during soccer practice (or any other sport or event for that matter) find an urgent care near you and save you both the time you could be spending in the comfort of your own home as a family instead of in a germ infested emergency room for a visit that turns out to be ten minuets long. You won’t regret the decision you make when your young one is quickly patched up and you both can get back to your normal busy evening sooner than you would have if you’d gone to the emergency room. So for all of the things that stop you in your spots and make you consider heading to the emergency room, give urgent care the first thought and take your child there first.
