Urgent care clinics are of a huge and growing importance in the United States. For people without health insurance and for those who are unable to take time off of work to schedule and attend a doctors appointment, urgent care clinics are essential in providing good medical care. Going to a medical walk in clinic often provides an ideal alternative to the emergency room, as the majority of emergency rooms can be hugely expensive, costing more than one thousand dollars for one visit. Emergency rooms often also have wait times of up to an hour or more, while typical urgent care clinics all throughout the United States have wait times of no more than fifteen minutes.

The vast majority of urgent care centers – around eighty five percent of them, to be even more exact – are open every single day of the week. This is often ideal for those who work full shifts and schedules, as it allows them the time to seek medical care and treatment without needing to miss work. For those without access to paid time off, walk in clinics such as urgent care centers are often the only way that they can get the assessment and treatment that they need without losing money that they often are very much in need of. Medical clinics like urgent care centers are often open at non standard hours as well, such as earlier in the morning and later into the evening than most traditional general care practitioner’s offices.

The cost of urgent care clinics is also much lower than the cost of emergency room care. While the typical urgent care clinic visit will only cost just around two hundred dollars or even less, a typical emergency room visit, as mentioned above, is likely to be much more prohibitively expensive. When people believe that emergency room in hospital care is their only option for thorough medical treatment, they often choose not to seek any in the first place, which can often become dangerous and even debilitating, depending on the medical issue that is at hand.

And the wait time in a typical emergency room is often extensive. It will be particularly long if you go into the emergency room with a non emergent medical problem, as cases are triaged and the most severe are, understandably, seen the most quickly. But an emergency room visit can last for hours for some, depending on the volume of the emergency room and the number of current staff on hand. On the flip side of things, around sixty percent of all urgent care clinics and walk in clinics have wait times of no longer than a total of fifteen minutes. The total time that a patient will spend in a typical urgent care location is usually not any longer than one full hour – or sixty minutes.

And many urgent care clinics treat a much wider range of conditions than most people know. For instance, around eighty percent of all urgent care clinics in the United States have the capability to diagnose and treat fractures. They are also able to treat ankle sprains that range from mild to more severe, of which there are at least twenty five thousand of every single day in this country alone. Respiratory conditions such as bronchitis are also commonly seen, diagnosed, and treated in urgent care settings – and are in fact the most commonly seen condition in an urgent care clinic – as is dizziness, which has been found to occur in seventy percent of all people at some point in their lives and is the second most often seen condition in a doctor’s office.

And urgent care clinics are growing and spreading all throughout the United States. Current data suggests that urgent care clinics in the United States now employ a total of twenty thousand doctors and other such medical professionals. These doctors are estimated to treat around three million patients every single week, a number that has only been shown to be continuing to grow. Urgent care clinics are hugely important, and are likely to continue to be so in the United States.