What Exactly Is Urgent Care?
If you are suffering from a condition or illness that threatens your life, such as severe head injury or a heart attack, then the only place you need to go is straight to a hospital emergency room. However, what if your condition isn’t currently life-threatening? There might be times that you don’t have your normal doctor available. Some don’t even have a doctor. In such instances, they go straight to an emergency room.
Urgent Care
This can backfire, since wait times get extended, you don’t get as much time with a doctor, and fees are a lot higher. Recently, there has been a new kind of medical care developing in many communities that fills this void in health care. It’s known as urgent care.
Urgent care centers offer a high level of health care in circumstances where your doctor’s office is either inaccessible or just closed. This is precisely why 85 percent of such centers are open for business every day of the week. In fact, nearly 3 million people visit them each week. That’s 1 out of every 100 people!
Urgent Care Center Or Emergency Room?
Despite how advantageous they are, many people aren’t sure when to use an urgent care facility over an emergency room or waiting for their doctor. The general rule of thumb is when you are suffering from any condition that isn’t a genuine emergency but still needs to be tended to before your doctor is available again.
Sprains and fractures are good reasons to go. The overwhelming majority of ankle sprains are just ankles inwardly rolled. Fortunately, 80 percent of urgent care facilities can treat fractures, meaning you can get examination and treatment to see if going to a hospital is even a necessity.
Moderate difficulty in breathing might be the result of an upper respiratory condition, which is the one thing most commonly diagnosed in these kinds of centers. Hacking cough and strep throat are good for an urgent care facility, but serious chest pain and/or difficulty breathing needs hospital care.
Labs, testing, and imaging can happen in urgent care clinics instead of waiting in an emergency room or scheduling a doctor’s appointment. Diagnostics, laboratory services, imaging, and even STD testing can happen in most urgent care facilities.
Urgent Care Facilities
No walk-in center should be a replacement for having a doctor that you see on a regular basis, and yet, urgent care facilities serve a very crucial role in the broader medical system, as they treat patients who have medical circumstances that are important but not actually a full-blown emergency. There’s no need to put off something getting checked out if you have the choice to get professional medical care right away.
It’s always a good idea to look up what your health insurance does and doesn’t cover in terms of urgent care centers. You always want to get care when you need it, but you might find that some centers are in-network and others aren’t, so if you have the chance to use one in-network without risking or sacrificing your health, it’s wise to do so.
How To Find The Nearest Urgent Care Center If You In NYC
If you are a frequent traveler and travel to other cities such as New York, then you need to keep a list of medical clinic at hand, especially urgent care clinics with 24 hours access. So how do you go about finding a 24 hr clinic in New York? Your best tools are the hotel and internet. Search through the internet using key phrases such as “urgent care in NYC” and you will find a list of clinics. Write them down on a piece of paper and keep it inside your wallet. It will come in handy when in emergency. Hotel reception is your next best friend. Talk to the receptionists when you check in. Ask them for the nearest clinics. They will be delighted to help you.