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The Rise of Urgent Care

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THE RISE OF URGENT CARE
Paul Padilla
Contemporary Issues in Healthcare

Abstract
Little things, like a skinned knee, can be treated at home. Life-threatening conditions, like chest pains, require a trip to the ER. For everything in between, there's urgent care. Urgent care offers treatment to patients of all ages for injury and illness, like the flu, asthma attacks, broken bones, cuts requiring stitches and more, providing you a one-stop option for unscheduled, time-sensitive care.

Urgent care centers represent a relatively recent development in the U.S healthcare. The urgent care Association of American defines the services these facilities offer as ambulatory care outside of a hospital emergency on a walk-in basis without a schedule appointment, many problems that can be seen in primary care doctor’s office some services that usually not available, things like x-ray’s and minor trauma treatment. The number of urgent clinics in the U.S was estimated to be as high as 20,000in the early 2000’s. (Howard P Greenwald, 2010). The association of urgent care almost half were owned by private profit seeking firms, 26% by hospital and 8% by multispecialty group practices or clinics. (Howard P Greenwald, 2010).
The urgent care center serves as a market niche that’s orientated around the customer. Urgent cares does this by the consumers not having to make appointment at times they stay open late in the evenings and most of them open on the weekend. A positive look on urgent care clinic is that many consumer reports that they don’t have to wait week’s even months to get an appointment just to see their primary doctor. (Howard P Greenwald, 2010) And let’s not talk about emergency room visit because they are the same thing, you will be going into an overcrowded room and consumers are required a long wait time. Such centers treat the most common injuries and

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