But urgent care centers have begun to provide another alternative to going to a typical doctor’s office or the emergency room – and they are becoming more widespread than ever before, all throughout the United States. In fact, it’s even been estimated that urgent care locations throughout the country now see as many as three million patients each and every week, a number that is only expected to continue to grow as time passes on. And in addition to this, urgent care centers also employ a total of twenty thousand doctors, a number that is also likely to keep growing exponentially.

But why are urgent care locations and other such medical clinics a better option than the emergency room? For one, their wait times are dramatically reduced. In your typical emergency room, you are actually likely to wait for nearly an hour (fifty eight minutes on average, to be more exact) if not even longer. In addition to this, wait times in emergency room locations are likely to increase for patients who are seeking medical care for relatively minor concerns.

But in the typical urgent care center, it’s a totally different story. In fact, more than ninety percent of all urgent care locations currently boast wait times that do not exceed thirty minutes. And up to sixty percent of these locations even have average wait times of only just fifteen minutes or less.

Urgent care centers are also ideal for the fact that many of them are open every single day of the week – up to eighty five percent of them, in fact. Unfortunately, most traditional doctor’s offices close during weekends and in the evenings, leaving many people thinking that they really have no choice but to go to an emergency room if they develop a medical condition that must be looked at with relative urgency over that same course of time. Fortunately, however, walk in clinics provide a viable alternative to seeking medical treatments when your typical doctor is not able to be seen.

And urgent care centers can actually diagnose and treat just about the same amount of things that your local emergency room would be able to do. In fact, statistics now show that up to sixty five percent of all hospital emergency room cases could actually have easily (and likely much more efficiently) been treated in a medical clinic location instead. After all, it has been found that up to eighty percent of all urgent care locations can actually provide fracture care and diagnosis, provided that the fracture itself has not led to other various medical complications.

Of course, your typical urgent care clinic will also provide more basic medical care as well. For instance, flu shots can typically be given at urgent care locations. As up to twenty percent of the entire population of the United States is likely to contract the flu during any given flu season (though likely a particularly bad one, if it is impacting so many people), getting the flu shot is highly recommended and really only takes a few minutes to go in and do. And even though the flu shot does not ever provide one hundred percent protection against the flu, it can lessen the severity of your symptoms even if you do still contract it, reducing your chance of having life threatening complications by quite a bit.

All throughout the country, urgent care centers are opening up the accessibility to medical treatment like nothing before. They are essential staples for medical care in many a community, and urgent care clinics have become more viable as an option than ever before here and in the vast majority of the United States as a whole. Urgent care centers matter.

The post Taking A Look At The Necessity Of Urgent Care Centers All Throughout The United States appeared first on Health and Fitness Tips.