According to the Urgent Care Association of America, roughly 69 percent of urgent care facilities have a wait time of 20 minutes or less. Urgent care centers help people because they alleviate the need to find an emergency room number, and they are many times cheaper and more convenient than emergency rooms and primary care doctors.
Roughly a tenth of urgent care facilities in America are found in rural areas. Plus, about half of all urgent care centers are owned by physicians. Regardless, pretty much every urgent care center in America have at least one full-time doctor on the premises at all times.
One of the best benefits to going to your local urgent care is the hours of business. About 70 percent of urgent care centers open at 8 am, and many of them are open 24 hours. Sickness and injury don’t sleep or go away at night, so urgent care centers operate through the night to treat people who get injured in those hours.
At the end of the day, it pays to go to an urgent care center because they are more convenient, cheaper, and require less waiting time than emergency rooms and primary care doctors. The next time you have a minor injury or sickness, you would do well to visit your local urgent care center. At the very least, it can keep you from looking up your emergency room number and save you time and money. See more.