In the United States, the average American knows very little about how the medical industry works. Surely there are people who are not doctors that understand when they are supposed to take prescribed medicine and what the medicine does to them but that does not mean they have any degree of awareness to how the actual medical industry works. There are plenty of examples to look to for evidence of this concept.
For instance, the average person has probably never heard of the National Health Interview Survey, which is also referred to as the NHIS. The NHIS revealed in 2014 that just about 8.4% children suffered from hay fever, 5% had to deal with food-related allergies, 10% suffered from respiratory allergies, and that 11% of all children had to deal with skin based allergies. Another great example of people being unaware of how the medical industry works deals directly with the difference between urgent and emergency.
For many people, there is no difference between urgent and emergency in their minds. This thought process comes from the fact that these two facilities are both based on health services and that they treat issues that are urgent. However, these two facilities are quite different from one another in multiple ways. Here are the difference between urgent and emergency.
Your local hospital most likely has an emergency room that deals with emergency care. Your local family urgent care facilities will contain urgent care treatment rooms and will deal directly with urgent issues. These two facilities are relatively close to one another despite the actual difference between urgent and emergency.
The real difference between urgent and emergency care facilities is that emergency facilities should primarily deal with emergency situations that could result in death or serious consequences. For instance, if you are involved in a nearly fatal car accident you will go to an emergency room. In that situation, no one is looking to find their local urgent care facility.
Every single year, across the nation there are 1 billion colds that end up affecting people’s day to day lives. In this same vein, the average child will end up coming down with anywhere between six and ten colds a year. These situations are not serious enough for an emergency room to handle and thus the urgent care facility will help them handle their colds in a timely fashion.
The second most common complaint heard in doctor’s offices across the nation is dizziness and just about 70% of the entire country will deal with this issue at some point in their lives. Dizziness is serious, but it is not serious enough for someone to be rushed to an emergency room as a result. So that is why urgent care facilities are essential for the average American.
every single day nearly 25,000 different American citizens will have to deal with an ankle sprain that they have suffered. While most people imagine that this would send someone to the emergency room, that is because they do not understand the difference between urgent and emergency care. Just about four out of all five urgent care centers will provide some form of fracture care.
In Conclusion
Milliman recently conducted a study to find out the real difference between urgent and emergency care. According to this private study, nearly 65% of all emergency room episodes could have been treated in an urgent care facility. Even though these two facilities feature similar types of staff, equipment, and locations, they both do different things. The emergency room is viewed as a place where people who are suffering from life or death issues will go. The urgent care, on the other hand, is a medical facility equipped to help people who are dealing with colds or the flu.
