No one wants to be sick during the holidays. Unfortunately, sickness and injuries tend to occur regardless of anyone’s busy holiday schedule. If you, or someone in your family finds yourself sick or injured this holiday season, you may find yourself faced with the challenge of where to get the care you need. As family pediatrician and physician offices sometimes offer limited hours during the holiday season, finding the care you need when you need it can be even more challenging. Although patients in the past may have looked toward their family doctor or local emergency room for their unexpected health care needs, a growing number of consumers select urgent care settings instead.
Urgent Care Locations Provide Convenient Hours
Attempting to get medical care for a cut eye on the morning of Christmas Eve may not be anyone’s idea of a fun holiday. Accidents happen, however, and looking for a place to get the necessary medical care on a holiday morning means that neither the family doctor nor the family pediatrician will be open. And while the hospital emergency room is always open, getting timely care in a place with other patients who are in real emergency situations can be a challenge.
Urgent care and quick care clinics, however, are open for extended hours. Some, in fact, are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, holidays included. The latest research on the health clinics across the country indicates that as many as 87% of urgent cares are open seven days a week. When a young child is so excited at the family Christmas party that she runs into to sharp edge of a wooden stool, it is comforting to know that you can get the care you need in a hurry, so that you can move on with the celebration.
Urgent Care Settings Offer Reliable Services

With as many as 20,000 physicians currently practicing Urgent Care Medicine, patients can find the reliable care that they need without having to have an appointment weeks in advance or without waiting for hours in an emergency room. As the nation’s health care system adjusts to an increasing number of Americans with access to health insurance, it is not surprising that physician’s groups around the country continue to look for a way to provide the best care to patients in an increasingly convenient setting. Did you know, for instance, that 80% of five urgent care centers provide fracture care? With the ability to provide x-rays and other types of scanning services, quick care clinics offer some options that are not even available in a family physician or pediatrician office. Even in a hospital emergency room setting, some x-rays are taken care of in totally different part of the hospital.
An urgent care clinic with scanning machines, however, can often give immediate feedback to a supervising doctor, and, when needed, these physicians can cast and set broken bones. Often times a visit to a family physician for a broken bone would include a second appointment in another location with the proper technology. Urgent care settings often allow patients to get the reliable care they need in one location.
Urgent Care Settings Provide Affordable Prices
In every health situation, it is only human nature to want the best care. Unfortunately, for some families best care still means an expensive hospital emergency room. Paying the high fees and overhead costs of a hospital emergency room, however, when the same services are more affordably offered at health clinic. In many urgent care health clinics the affordability factor is written out in black and white. With fees and charges posted, patients who visit an urgent care are not hit with unexpected and hidden charges from a hospital emergency room.
Medical care is expensive enough. No one should be over paying for the care they need. Selecting the right platform for health care is often the secret to avoiding the extra high fees that can take months, if not years, to pay off.
Whether you come down with strep throat on Christmas Even or a twisted ankle on New Year’s Day, an urgent care setting is often the best way to get quick, convenient, and affordable care. Who will you call?