It is easy to assume that the emergency room is the first place to go when there is ever illness or injury at an odd hour of the night. Especially if it is a situation that cannot wait for the scheduled appointment with your family physician. However, there are much easier places to visit, including local emergency clinics where there is quality medical care with much shorter wait times.
Reasons to Avoid the ER
If you ever wonder about rushing to the ER for the cold, flu, cuts, scrapes, cough, stomach pain, sore throats, or sprained ankle, that may not be the best choice. It is important to remember that the emergency room staff are available 24/7, but they are told to make sure that patients with the most life-threatening conditions receive care first. Therefore, people with heart attacks and strokes will reach the doctors much faster than you will.
What is a Local Emergency Clinic?
Local emergency clinics and urgent care centers are basically the same things. They are most often open 24 hours a day and offering professional medical care for almost everything you could possibly imagine. With sprains, strains and other athletic injuries that take place every day, these doctors and nurses are highly needed so that patients don’t have to wait for hours at the ER. More immediate care is offered at urgent care, and there is likely one just around the corner from your home.
Emergency Room vs. Urgent Care
You may think that the emergency room staff is the most reliable to take care of all illnesses and injuries. However, the ER is rarely immediately available. Considering their primary role in caring for patients facing life-threatening situations, your ankle sprain or hard cough won’t be handled urgently. Luckily, that is why the urgent care clinics, or local emergency clinics, are able to handle those cases so quickly. It is in their brand.
In most communities, there are walk-in clinics around the corner, or at least within a couple of miles of your home. They can treat sprains and strains, and the potential broken bones that will be placed at the back of the list at the ER. Urgent care also has a testing lab, helping to stabilize these injuries in case they need further treatment. Illnesses like a heavy cough, chest congestion, ear infection, sinus infection, colds, flu, or others may just need a prescription, and urgent care is able to help. With experienced medical professionals at urgent care, you can get prescriptions immediately without having to wait for hours at the ER to even be seen.
With so many problems that can arise at any point, it is helpful to have local emergency clinics to help manage immediate and urgent infections. This is even more important if you were to visit the emergency room, get stuck in the waiting room, and then face a more serious condition as a result of that long wait. If it appears that you have something that could be treated comfortably or easily like nausea, headaches, flu, cold, or other issues that could use a prescription those can be offered right there in the local clinic. And you can walk in just like the ER.
Even more illnesses or discomforts from insomnia to indigestion and more can be handled quickly and properly at the urgent care clinic. There is no reason to ever sit at home suffering over seeking out the care of a medical clinic. Especially with visit times averaging about a half hour and about 97% of urgent care patients being treated on site, there is always the ability to trust your decision to visit urgent care.
