Amber’s parents dropped her off at the University of Arkansas, got her settled into the dormitory, gave her plenty of good advice and a little more cash, and drove home, worrying just as much as they did when she started kindergarten. They didn’t think about talking with her about how to get urgent care with their family insurance plan, and Amber didn’t think about it at all until she hurt her leg playing Ultimate Frisbee.
Jim loves to putter around the house, and he never considered his hobby dangerous until one Sunday afternoon he became one of the more than 100,000 Americans who fall from a ladder each year. His wife wanted to take him to the emergency room, but his previous experiences with the emergency room made him unwilling to use the local ER.
Corinne woke up one morning feeling so sick that she could scarcely get out of bed. She had been thinking about getting health insurance and finding a family doctor… and making a will, too, and all kinds of things that she knew were part of becoming an adult. But somehow just getting settled into her new job and her new apartment and enjoying her new life seemed to take up all her time, and dealing with things like urgent care never made it to the top of her to-do list.
There are many reasons that you might need urgent care, and if you haven’t thought about it ahead of time, the stress of being sick or injured can make it hard to make good decisions about getting that care. If you don’t yet have a primary care physician or it’s outside of regular doctor’s hours, you need a plan other than calling your doctor.
Should you visit an urgent care facility like MANA Urgent Care, or an emergency room? Here are some factors to consider:
- Is it a life-threatening major trauma kind of emergency? If so, you should call 911 and head for the emergency room. If not, you should bear in mind that having all the equipment and facilities to deal with major medical emergencies can make emergency rooms very expensive. The cost gets shared out among all the people who visit the ER, even if they don’t need that level of care. An urgent care walk-in clinic can be much more economical than an emergency room.
- Is time an issue? Emergency rooms treat the most serious problems first. That means that a sprain or a bad case of the flu can keep you waiting in the emergency room for a very long time. At MANA Urgent Care, you can expect to be seen much more quickly.
- How about your insurance? It is often much less expensive to visit our walk-in clinic. With a number of insurances the copay is the same as an office visit. Check with the urgent care clinic and with the emergency room to find out whether they participate in your insurance network or not. Both an ER and an acute care clinic may be in-network for your health insurance, but you should also check to see whether their physicians are in-network.
MANA Urgent Care provides quality care for students and other community members in Fayetteville. Make sure that your student knows where to go for urgent care while at the University of Arkansas, and make sure that you know about MANA Urgent Care if you live in Northwest Arkansas.