If you are faced with a true medical emergency – one that requires immediate medical attention, and could potentially be life threatening or cause serious or permanent damage – you should go to the emergency room.
Emergency rooms are equipped to handle the most extreme medical emergencies, and they will administer care based on the severity of the emergency. This means that if you are losing blood, have been bitten by a poisonous snake, or are having a severe allergic reaction, you should go to the emergency room immediately and seek medical attention as quickly as possible.
However, one of the biggest drawbacks to an emergency room visit is the enormous medical bill that you will receive in the mail a few weeks later. If you’re faced with a life-threatening emergency, this bill is worth every penny. But there are situations in which an ER visit isn’t necessary, and that expensive bill could have been avoided.
Let’s say that your child swallows a marble. As a parent, your first instinct is to whisk them away to the emergency room and get them the immediate medical attention that they need. So you rush to the hospital, and wait for three hours as the people with more severe injuries are seen ahead of you. When a doctor finally gets around to seeing your child, they tell you that there’s nothing to do, and you will just have to wait for your child to pass the marble. A couple of weeks later, you get an emergency room bill for several hundred dollars.
What you should have done is gone to an urgent care clinic. Assuming that your child isn’t choking, a swallowed marble isn’t a medical emergency. Urgent care clinics see patients based on order of arrival, and they are far less expensive than an ER visit.
Urgent care clinics provide medical services for minor illnesses and injuries, minor surgeries, infections, fevers, earaches, and more. If you’re faced with a serious medical emergency, you should absolutely go to the ER. However, if your ailment isn’t time sensitive, an urgent care clinic might be a better option.
MediServe Walk-in Clinics provide convenient medical care when you need it most. There are two MediServe locations in Fayetteville, and both are staffed by MANA physicians. Stop by MediServe College or MediServe Wedington the next time you need urgent medical care.