Wednesday, 1 August 2018

Emergency Room or ER: What's Right for You Today?

The Urgent Care Association of America estimates there are around 13,000 to 16,000 urgent care centers in the USA. Many illnesses and injuries that require timely treatment but are not true emergencies are ideally suited to evaluation in an urgent care center. If your individual physician is not available, a stop by at an urgent care center may provide convenient access to quality healthcare. In communities that do not yet have an urgent care center, the neighborhood hospital emergency department may be overrun with inappropriate visits--visits that involve relatively minor problems that could be better suited to the urgent care center. Urgent care centers are often a much better choice for on-demand use of healthcare, because urgent care centers generally:

have shorter wait times,


have convenient access in the neighborhood,


focus on caring for conditions of mild to moderate acuity (not the care of life-threatening emergencies), and


are equipped to care for more severe conditions than the typical primary care physician (offering x-rays, suturing, and administration of intravenous fluids).

On the other hand, some illnesses or injuries are not appropriate for treatment in an urgent care centers and must certanly be evaluated and treated in a hospital emergency department. Examples of these kinds of emergency conditions include:


a fifty year old woman with intermittent chest pain for days gone by twenty-four hours (may be a center attack),


a twenty year old girl with a fever of 104° who is not fully conscious and has an allergy over his body (may be meningitis),


a twenty year old man with severe neck pain after an accident on the highway (may be described as a fractured neck),


an seventy year old man who fell down a flight of stair and has not fully recovered from the concussion (may be a brain hemorrhage), and


a chemotherapy patient with a higher fever (may be a serious life-threatening infection).


Most non-life-threatening illnesses and injuries, however, can be evaluated and treated in a urgent care centers. Below are a few types of conditions that always present appropriately to urgent care centers:

a five year old boy with diarrhea for two days,


a forty year old man with rib pain after slipping in a icy parking lot,


a twenty year old man with burning on urination,


a four year old girl who tripped and has a painful ankle,


and a great many other mild to moderate illnesses or injuries.


Generally speaking, if you believe you may be experiencing an urgent situation condition, go to a hospital emergency department. If you're unsure, you may call your doctor or your neighborhood urgent care center to help you decide whether an urgent care center or a hospital emergency department is more appropriate.

To find an urgent care center in your community, you might try the following ideas:

Search the phrase "urgent care mycity"; (for example, "urgent care chicago") on a major se (Google, Yahoo or MSN).


Go the Practice Velocity urgent care directory on the Practice Velocity webpage (www.practicevelocity.com)


Try looking in your health insurance provider directory for urgent care centers that participate in your health plan.


Urgent care centers generally offer timely, convenient healthcare access. When you really need to view a physician today (and you can not be in to see your own personal physician) for an illness or injury that is not just a true emergency, an urgent care center may be a fantastic option as opposed to the emergency department.



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