Urgent Care Centers the Need for Urgent

Urgent Care Centers

The Need for Urgent Care Centers

As humans we are exposed to various illnesses throughout our lives, some more severe than others. Due to this, we are constantly in need of doctors, nurses, hospital and other health related centers. Urgent care, which is defined as "the delivery of ambulatory medical care" by the Urgent Care Association of America (UCAOA), and the centers with which it is associated are vital to our society as well. This paper will therefore provide detail upon the topic of this essay, including an argument for the need of an urgent care center within one's community. It will also include, as part of this detailing of the topic, cost advantage issues and other issues involving the quality of care as superior to those services offered in hospitals or other health care facilities.

The primary issue to be tackled in this paper is why urgent care centers are so necessary. In order to do this, one must analyze the scope of urgent care, which should be to treat as many problems as possible, as would be done in a primary physician's office, but also to offer services which would not necessarily be available in a primary care physician's office. Such an example includes x-ray facilities, according to UCAOA. Another example can include the fact that, in these kinds of facilities there are also services that allow for minor laceration and trauma treatment, whereas a physician's office is not equipped for such incidents and would most likely not provide this care and/or send the individual to the hospital emergency room.

The UCAOA further describes the value of urgent care, which is that these centers actually provide savings to patients and insurers when compared to similar service in hospital settings and emergency departments. Furthermore and needless to say, is that urgent care facilities also treat those individuals who cannot wait for a physician or cannot go to a hospital. In addition, it sheds light on the convenience of urgent care, which it describes with some data from the Center for Disease Control, which states,

"…a patient visit to hospital emergency departments currently averages 3.2 hours, and a more recent Press-Ganey study estimated visit time at 4 hours. Many of the problems currently treated in hospital emergency departments can receive timely treatment in less than one hour in an urgent care center."

Indeed, it seems that the CDC has reported as well that over 40% of hospital emergency room visits are really non-urgent or semi-urgent problems which would also aggravate the situation in an emergency room, making it more stressful for the staff and more crowded and overwhelming for the patients.

Other sources estimate the number to be lower, but on average this number does go above 20% or more.

Another benefit of the urgent care center is that in most centers, according to statistics given by the UCAOA, extended hours for patients during weekdays and weekend are available. Furthermore, these facilities also allow patients to come in when their physician is unavailable. Therefore, these kinds of services have contributed greatly to the growth of the sector. Due to this reason, patients have come in to these centers and allowed their numbers to grow through the years, according to the UCAOA.

Some issues to ponder, however, especially due to all of these positives for urgent care centers, are whether they truly allow for any cost savings and can provide quality care. As seen above, urgent care center will most definitely cost less than a visit to the hospital, according to the UCAOA.

Thus, the remaining issue is the quality of care. This has also been examined above and has stated that in deed, in an urgent care center, the patient will be given more attention than in an emergency room where overcrowding, and business and stress of the staff will lead to perhaps looking more superficially at a patient. In order to better understand how quality is measured one can look at the following statistic given by the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine (JUCM):

"Approximately 30% of urgent care centers routinely measure quality of care using nationally recognized measures such as the National Committee for Quality Assurance's Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS), measures from The Joint Commission, or others. By comparison, 20% of all physicians nationally report receiving quality of care data about the proportion of their patients who receive recommended care, and 18% receive data on patients' clinical outcomes (such as glycemic control for diabetic patients). However, 46% of urgent care centers assess quality using measures they have developed themselves, and 16.5% do not measure the quality of the care they provide."