Four Reasons to Opt for Urgent Care Instead of the ER

It’s game day. Volleyball finals. You jump up to spike it over the net and come down hard on your left ankle. You get up, find you can still move it and walk on it, but not without excruciating pain. Definitely time to hit the emergency room, right?

No way — that’ll take forever. You’d book an appointment with your family health care doctor if it didn’t take two weeks to make an appointment last time. When you’ve exhausted all your other options, it might be time to go with the most reasonable one from the get-go: urgent care.

Urgent can’t won’t keep you waiting.

Urgent care is sometimes called immediate care, so you get the idea of how serious the workers are about getting you treated quickly. Most patients don’t wait longer than 15 minutes before getting seen by the doctor, and a standard trip is usually over in an hour. When you’re trying to find a doctor, urgent care facilities can handle sprains, strains, fractures, respiratory illnesses, gastrointestinal conditions, concussions and simple cuts and bruises.

Need an X-ray, special test or simple physical? Urgent care’s got you covered.

In addition to all the symptoms listed above, some urgent care centers are now even equipped with X-ray machines and laboratory testing sites. That means you can know definitively what’s wrong more quickly than if you visited the ER or your regular doctor’s office. Of course, if you just need a simple physical exam, urgent care doctors can handle that, too.

Urgent care can ease the burden on the ER.

In the United States, one study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed just how useful urgent care centers can be. Nearly half of all the adult patients surveyed had sicknesses that didn’t require ER attention, but they sought out ER treatment anyway because their regular doctors’ offices were closed. When you need to find a doctor, you should never have to choose between waiting for hours and simply continuing to be sick. That’s where urgent care — with a number of sites open 24 hours — can help.

When your primary care doctor’s booked, opt for urgent care.

As primary care physicians have begun to take on more and more caseloads, the amount of time they have available for their patients has decreased. Couple this with their limited office hours, and you have a recipe for not being able to get the care you need when you need it. When it comes time to find a doctor, remember urgent care and get treated sooner.

Whether you need stitches, antibiotics for an infection or a routine physical, 24 hr urgent care centers can provide care in a more timely manner than an ER. The 21st century is the age of convenience, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to find a doctor quickly and without much worry. Leave yourself in the good hands of urgent care. More.