Finding The Right Medical Experience For You
If you’re looking to get adept and accurate medical care, there are certainly a great many places that you can go. Of course, you can go to your typical family practice doctor. Such a doctor will be able to provide you with the care that you need to get back on your feet. Since they know your history, medically speaking, they will likely be able to better provide you with a diagnosis. In addition to this, the average family practice will take all kinds of patients, from the youngest to the oldest.
However, there is a detriment to seeking out your family practice doctor for all your medical care. For one thing, this type of a doctor’s office simply is not open all hours of day and night. Most are closed for at least part of the weekend, and they tend to only be open during typical business hours. If you can’t take off work or develop a health concern later into the evening, then it is likely that you will not be able to see your GP or family doctor for treatment, especially if the condition you’re dealing with might be urgent.
Of course, you can always go to the local emergency room. And it is very true that for true emergencies, this is very much the place to be. However, going to the emergency room for a more minor medical issue is likely to not be the best idea for a number of different reasons. For one thing, the average emergency room visit, even for a relatively minor complaint, is likely to be quite expensive indeed. As a matter of fact, it would not be surprising for such a visit to cost more than $1,000 when all was said and done. And for those who do not have medical insurance, the costs will only be higher, for while the emergency room will treat anyone no matter if they are insured or not, the prices for treatment remain the same.
In addition to this, the wait times that you’ll find at the typical ER are incredibly long. The average emergency room will actually have a wait time of at least one hour, if not even longer than that. Fortunately, going to see a doctor at an urgent care center provides a viable alternative, as the vast majority of urgent care clinics (up to 90% of them, as a matter of fact) will be able to get you in to see a doctor in no more than a mere half of an hour. And while some people might be concerned about care, a typical urgent care center doctor will be able to provide care that is high in overall quality indeed.
For a great many people, the average urgent care clinic can also provide just the level of care that they are in need of. After all, less than 5% – only around 3%, to be just a bit more specific – of all patients seen first by a doctor in an urgent care center setting will ever end up needing to be transferred to a hospital. This means that most people will be able to receive the care that they need all within the average urgent care setting. After all, the doctors who work in such places are highly qualified and plentiful, with more than 20,000 of them found at the more than 7,000 urgent care centers that are seen from one end of the country to the next (and in all the space in between as well). And this was according to data that was first collected back in the year of 2016, meaning that more and more urgent care centers and doctors to staff them have sprung up in the time that has followed us since.
Ultimately, urgent care centers are growing ever more popular with the passage of time. Not only is the typical doctor more likely to work in such an establishment than ever before, but the average person is more likely to attend an urgent care location as well. After all, up to three million estimated people will look into going to an urgent care throughout the course of a week.
