Often times, people can forget the important role that urgent care centers play in a happy and healthy society. People may assume that their injury is not severe enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room, and don’t seek treatment. However, urgent care facilities represent an extremely crucial middle ground between the ER and ignoring your problem. While urgent care centers can’t offer as diverse or extreme an array of services as an emergency room, they are much more affordable, usually much quicker, and quite often a lot closer to your home. It’s important to know what kind of services you can get with urgent care, so you don’t waste your time and money in the emergency room, or so you don’t sweep an issue under the rug by avoiding it and staying home. Here are four different important services that you can get at an after hours care clinic, so that you can skip the emergency room.
X-rays
X-rays may be the most crucial offering of an after hours care facility. Often times people get hurt and have no way of knowing the severity of their injury. For instance, you may fall on your wrist, and it may hurt too much for you to stay at home, but you’re afraid it’s just a sprain and isn’t worth a trip to the emergency room. Head to the urgent care clinic and they can run an x-ray, which can help diagnose how serious the injury really is.
Casts
If the aforementioned wrist injury turns out to be pretty serious, don’t worry: the after hours urgent care clinic can provide you with a cast to send you on your way safely. Even if you know that you’ve broken a bone, you can still go to an urgent care facility to have a cast put on. Chances are, they’ll be able to see you more quickly than if you went to the emergency room, and you can get what you need as soon as possible.
Stitches
Just like an after hours urgent care center can take care of your broken bones, they can also tend to your open wounds. Urgent care clinics have stitches on the ready, and can take care of any cuts or lacerations that you may have. If you need to get a wound sewn up, urgent care is your best, and cheapest option.
General Sickness Diagnosis
It’s general sickness that tends to keep people at home, thinking “It’s not that bad, I don’t need to go to the emergency room.” That may be the case, but you should go to an urgent care center. While emergency rooms are the best for severe illnesses, any general sickness (such as a sore throat, fever, dizziness, digestive problems, etc) can be diagnosed at an after hours urgent care clinic. Shortly after arriving you can know whether or not your sickness is serious or passing, and how best you can fight it.
It’s important to go to the emergency room for life or death situations, and it’s imperative that you know when to call 911, and when your best option is to visit a Prime Urgent Care clinic in Pearland, Sugar Land, or Missouri City, Texas, to get the services listed above. Walk in or check in online at a center near your location.
