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Urgent Care Clinics Provide High-quality Care
If you need care for a minor illness or injury, where will you go?
If national surveys are accurate, you'd probably head to the nearest hospital emergency room. Nearly half of Americans received care in a hospital emergency department in 2009, making an astonishing 136 million visits in a single year, according to research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Remarkably, only a third of those visits were injury related, and less than 13% resulted in hospital admission. In other words, the vast majority of emergency department patients were not experiencing life-threatening symptoms. That's the good news.
But here's the bad news: The burden of seeing so many people in non-emergency situations is producing some unpleasant – and even dangerous – side effects for patients, providers and hospitals.
Over the past decade, researchers have found that the country‘s emergency departments are at a breaking point. They're overwhelmed by the number of patients needing their services. That's why almost 80% of emergency room patients wait longer than 15 minutes to be seen by a healthcare provider.
Longer wait times aren't a major issue for people who aren't experiencing life-threatening symptoms. But the delays can be life-altering for someone with serious problems, such as a heart attack or stroke.
Even more troubling for everyone is the higher rate of mistakes, such as medication errors, inappropriate treatments, and surgical snafus. With overworked staff frantically juggling the demands of patients in a high-pressure setting, emergency departments have become a “perfect storm” environment for medical errors that can be harmful and even fatal.
High-quality healthcare means getting the right care, at the right time, for the right reason. Patients get the best healthcare when they can avoid underuse, avoid overuse, and eliminate misuse of healthcare resources.
For serious but non-critical medical symptoms, urgent care clinics are a better alternative. Urgent care clinics are usually open evenings and weekends, and they offer the convenience of walk-in appointments for common illnesses and minor injuries that need attention but are not life-threatening, such as:
- Cuts, bruises and sprains
- Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea
- Cold and flu symptoms
- Stings, rashes, allergic reactions and infections
Click to search the Aetna directory for urgent care providers.