Urgent care centers have been springing up all throughout the United States. At the current date, there are more than three million people attending these now more than 7,000 (as of the year of 2016) urgent care locations over the course of a single week. In addition to this, such urgent care centers are now staffed with more than 20,000 doctors and medical professionals. Such medical professionals help to make the standard of care in urgent care locations higher than ever before, something that is certainly only continuing to grow and grow as time passes on.
Urgent care centers are great places to go when you need medical care because they have the right medical professionals to handle your needs. These medical professionals can treat a whole array of issues, from minor injuries to illnesses. Such medical professionals can also help to provide preventative medical care and testing services. For instance, medical professionals in your typical urgent care location will likely be able to give you an STD test, should you find that you are in need of one. This is hugely important, as the results of such a test are very important for finding out what your next healthcare steps should really be. Without this knowledge, making the right healthcare decisions can prove highly difficult indeed, to say the very least on the subject.
In addition to this, medical professionals can provide a number of vaccinations at various urgent care facilities. As a matter of fact, getting your flu shot is something that just about every person can access in the typical urgent care clinic. After all, protecting as much of the population as possible against the flu is something that is seriously important indeed – not something to be taken for granted in the slightest.
Far too many people compare the flu to the common cold, which is even more common. But while even healthy children can get up to eight cases of the cold in a single year, the flu is much more serious than any common cold out there. In fact, as many as 200,000 different people will need hospital care due to complications originating from the flu. Tragically, those who are members of at risk populations – such as the old and the very young – even face the risk of dying from the flu. Therefore, it is hugely important to create as much herd immunity as possible, something that can be done through the widespread administration of the flu vaccination, which comes out just before flu season kicks off each and every year.
In addition to this, many medical professionals at urgent care locations can handle more serious matters as well. For instance, up to 80% of all urgent care locations are actually able to deal with fracture cases, provided that they are not overly complex. In fact, the average urgent care location is more fully competent than many people realize, able to treat more than 95% of all the cases that they see. This means that, effectively, only around 3% of all patients that are originally seen in an urgent care center will not be able to be treated by the medical professionals working there and will instead need to be sent to a nearby hospital.
The convenience of the average urgent care location is often just as much of a selling point as the local medical professionals working there are. After all, waiting times in most urgent care locations are quite ideal, especially in direct comparison to the likely waiting time for the local emergency room. In the typical urgent care center, you’ll have an average waiting time of a mere 30 minutes, something that has been able to be implemented at more than 90% of the urgent care locations in operation throughout the country. And as a matter of fact, as many as 60% of all urgent care centers have even been able to cut this average waiting time down to only just 15 minutes. In comparison to the hour plus waiting times at any given emergency room location, this short period of time is nothing at all – and is something that makes visiting a local urgent care center appealing.