With the advancement of health care, there are more options when you get hurt or sick than there were decades ago. For instance, you can visit an urgent care facility instead of having to go see your primary care doctor or go to the emergency room.

Urgent care centers are there for when people have a condition that does not require an emergency room visit, but does require rapid medical attention. Furthermore, urgent care centers are supposed to ease the burden on emergency rooms by treating conditions that would not merit an emergency room trip.

You can go to an urgent care facility, for example, if you have a sprain or strain, fracture, upper respiratory illness, gastrointestinal illness, lacerations or a concussion. It really helps out the emergency rooms and doctors, who have become saturated with clients, and allows patients to be treated effectively and conveniently.

In 2010, the Rand Corporation ran a study that found one in five visits to emergency rooms in hospitals could have been treated at urgent care centers. That could have saved 4.4 billion dollars in health care costs.

Another benefit of urgent care is the hours. After hours urgent care is useful for people who maybe fall down the stairs in the night and need medical attention, but cannot make it to the hospital easily. In some cases 24 hour urgent care facilities exist, that will treat you at any time of the day, any day of the week.

On average, between a twentieth and a fifth of Americans come down with the flu every year. Although this does require immediate medical care usually, it does not always need to merit a trip to the emergency room. The next time you are hurt or ill, ask yourself if you really need to go to the emergency room. If you do not, you can go to an urgent care center and find out for yourself just how convenient and helpful they really are. Especially if you need after hours urgent care, you will be satisfied with their high level of quality in health care.
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