Where Do You Go When Your Family Needs Evening or Weekend Health Care?

It is a standing joke in your home that you are the local expert about the best in urgent care services in the region. With a college gymnast and a high school cross country runner in the house, you have had plenty of experience in late afternoon trips to get an x-ray on a rolled ankle or a weekend visit to see if a fever is something that you need to worry about. With two different athletes who are also great students with a lot of friends, your family has seen its fair share of health challenges. Not all of them, however, can easily be scheduled into a typical family physician’s appointment. They are also not so serious that they need to be treated in a hospital emergency room.

Although knowing the best in urgent care services in the area is not necessarily something to be proud of, it is information that has come in handy when you are at the gym or on the course with other parents who are dealing with a recent injury.

Finding the Right Health Care Options Is Important to Today’s Consumers

Understanding when to seek emergency care and when it makes more sense to go to a local urgent care is an important consumer skill in today’s complicated health care market. The fact of the matter is that you can get effective treatment at an affordable and convenient walk in clinic. Although there are certain times when it is much more appropriate to seek out medical treatment at the ER, the truth is that as many as 44% to 65% of all ER episodes could have been effectively treated at an urgent care, according to a recent study. Spending too much money and time on an unnecessary hospital ER visit does not make sense.

To understand how integral the urgent care market is in today’s world, consider this fact: urgent care centers reported seeing an average of nearly 12,000 patients in the 2015 fiscal year. That amounts to an average of three patient care visits an hour, or 32 visits every day. Knowing that you can get the care that you need without having to pay the expensive fees at a hospital encourages families to take care of themselves whenever they need treatment.