Getting prompt medical care can be important for a wide variety of reasons and a wide array of medical concerns. For many people, however, the means to getting this medical care are not always ideal. Going and making an appointment with someone such as a general care practitioner can be quite frustrating, as a matter of fact, as such a doctor might not have office hours that line up with the person looking to seek care, such as being closed in the evenings, early in the mornings, and on the weekends. And while the emergency room in just about every single community will be open 24 hours of the day and every single day of the week, including major holidays, there are certainly many detriments to going to an emergency room when you are having a less than emergent medical concern.

For instance, the wait times associated with the emergency room are likely to be quite astronomically high indeed. In fact, it is not at all uncommon to wait at least an hour – if not even more than that – to be seen in any given emergency room. And once you are seen by a doctor or nurse, there are likely to still be long periods of waiting interspersed in your treatment. Unfortunately, many emergency room locations are very crowded indeed, making them difficult to function when it comes to operating in any sort of a timely manner.

Fortunately, urgent care centers have been providing a much needed alternative for medical care and can now be found all throughout the country, with well over 7,000 urgent care locations now in operation – and many more likely to come in the years that are ahead, for that matter. And because the vast majority of all urgent care clinics – up to 85% of them, as a matter of fact – are actually open each and every day of the week, there is no doubting that their patient base is very much on the rise. After all, walk in urgent care centers actually now get more than three million patients over the course of just one single week. Treated by more than 20,000 doctors and other such medical professionals, urgent care locations have become much higher in quality than ever before.

And they boast remarkably low wait times. In more than 90% of all urgent care centers found throughout the country, the average wait time does now exceed a half of an hour at the very most. And more than half of all urgent care walk in clinics have wait times that, on average, do not even exceed a mere 15 minutes. The average patient who goes to an urgent care center is typically able to get in, be seen, and be sent on their way with whatever treatment necessary all within the course of just one hour. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that up to one quarter of the population of the United States has been to an urgent care location for the urgent care treatment that such a place can provide within the span of the last two years.

Ultimately, the quality of care that the average urgent care location or walk-in clinic can provide is really quite high indeed, as the doctors who work as such medical centers are just as qualified as doctors in other realms of the medical world. Even fracture care is now available at up to 80% of all urgent care centers and many of these centers can perform basic wound repair, often in the form of stitches, as well. And nearly the same amount of walk in clinics are even now able and qualified to administer IV fluids to those who are in need of them.

Ultimately, the average urgent care center is an institution that is very much on the rise. In the years that are ahead of us, such centers are only likely to become more and more popular and more and more highly utilized as well, for that matter. Of course, more and more of them are likely to open their doors in the years ahead.