Urgent care is often something scene on TV in many people’s minds; you roll up to a hospital, enter the emergency room door, and doctors and nurses on the trauma team are ready and available to deal with a problem right away. Real after hours care doesn’t work so well in many institutions.
In real life you walk into the emergency room and are automatically given a lower priority. Why? Because you walked in on your own power versus being carried in by an ambulance team on a gurney. That automatically delegates a new patient to checking in and then sitting in a waiting room with other sick patients until called. After that, you may get moved to a triage room and, after a brief discussion with a nurse, left to sit in another room for more time. Eventually, a doctor will see you and determine a diagnosis and treatment. By the time the process is over, it’s conceivable in a number of urban centers to be sitting in an emergency room for four hours or more before returning home.
After hours care doesn’t have to be a Sisyphean struggle to get medical treatment. Ideally, a person who is sick should be able to go into a clinic or hospital and be attended to in a reasonable amount of time versus spending half a day in pain and discomfort waiting. Unfortunately, hospital emergency rooms become a choke point for a number of reasons. One could write a book on the matter but, depending on the hospital, the traffic jam can include trauma victims, indigent services, regular member services, and those who don’t want to wait for an appointment through regular scheduling. And, because the doctors and nurses don’t know who is a real case versus a non-priority case until reviewing the matter, they take everyone on a case by case basis. That creates a bad recipe for a logjam when it comes to urgent medical care.
When you’re a parent and your child gets hurt, or you ate bad food and are suffering from food poisoning, or your spouse was bit badly by a dog at the park, waiting for five hours just to get care doesn’t equate. After hours urgent care needs to be exactly that – urgent.
Cigna Urgent care is ready and capable of providing after hours care to patients in critical or urgent need without the incredibly long waits. Their function as an urgent care clinic allows Cigna far more flexibility and capability in responding to medical care needs quickly, even at night and on weeks. There’s no reason for folks to still have to struggle and wait in pain at traditional emergency rooms when many services can be had in fraction of the time at Cigna. Do yourself and your health a favor; get urgent care quickly from Cigna.
