Urgent care facilities are there for you, when your walk in doctors are closed for the day and you need to find an immediate care center. Think about every time you have ever gone to an emergency room. Has it ever not been packed? Has there ever not been at least a dozen miserable looking people who have been waiting there for almost three hours? That is right, there has not. That is because these people should have gone to urgent care facilities instead.

One of the main reasons that they do not go to urgent care facilities is that they believe that their ailment is an emergency, and should be treated and tended to as such. If the limb is not going to fall off, or the patient is not going to die, then you should not be going to an emergency room. Emergency rooms are life and limb only! A list of common conditions that emergency rooms see that they never should, ailments perfect fr urgent care facilities, are: concussions, lacerations, gastrointestinal conditions such as food poisoning, fractures, upper respiratory illnesses, sprains and strains. Even the common cold is seen in emergency rooms all the time, from which there are about 1 billion Americans afflicted a year. And even broken bones can be brought to urgent care facilities. And there are almost 7 million of those in the United States each year.

These wide range of conditions that fill up emergency rooms, and that could have been handled in urgent care facilities, a part of a great epidemic. The Rand Corporation did a study in 2010 that found that almost one fifth of all hospital emergency room visits could have gone to urgent care facilities instead, which could have save almost $4.5 in health care costs annually. A reason for this is that studies have found that hospitals hike their prices for simple medical materials to exorbitant prices, making an emergency room visit sometimes five to ten times more expensive than what would be paid at urgent care facilities.

A gross misconception about urgent care facilities is that they are understaffed or not staffed with professional doctors. This could not be farther from the truth. Nearly two thirds of urgent care facilities employ a combination of physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and physicians. While 65 percent of centers actually have at least one physician on site at all times. Read more blogs like this. Read more about this topic at this link. Find out more here.