Having a sick child is certainly no fun. From wondering what to feed sick kids to finding the time to take them in to see a doctor, a sick child can be an emotionally and physically draining experience for everyone involved, from the part to the child themselves. What to feed sick kids is a common question and parents who have kids who are healthy most of the time might even struggle to answer such basic concerns. But when it comes to taking off work to take a child in to a doctor’s office to get them diagnosed and to ask such questions as what to feed sick kids, it can be difficult to find the time to make this happen, especially if your child develops symptoms early in the morning or late at night, after the majority of general care practitioner’s offices will have closed.
So what’s the alternative? For many people, it’s taking their child to the emergency room, even though many sick children are just that – sick – and are far from being medical emergencies. And while emergency rooms are always open to everyone who has a medical concern, taking a child that is not sick enough or injured enough to be considered a medical emergency will not only further congest the waiting room and the emergency room itself, but will make it difficult to get thorough and timely treatment – and parents with questions might not even really have the time to ask what to feed sick kids or any other of the basic but important questions that they are likely to have.
Urgent care centers, particularly specialty pediatric urgent care centers, provide a much better option than the emergency room. In any given urgent care center, for instance, you’ll likely to find a drastically reduced wait time than what you’d see in the typical emergency room, where waiting to see a doctor usually takes at least an hour, if not considerably longer. In more than ninety percent of all urgent care locations, however, the opposite is true, as the maximum average wait time tops out at thirty minutes. For more than half of all urgent care locations across the country, the average wait time has even been able to be reduced to a mere fifteen minutes.
As there is not the congestion of patients seen in the typical urgent care clinic in the way that it is seen in the emergency room, an urgent care location is a great place to ask questions about your sick child, such s what to feed sick kids and how long to keep them out of school. After all, while most childhood illnesses are brief and far from severe or dangerous in any sense of the word, they are quite common, as children are still in the process of fully developing their immune systems. Ear infections, for instance, are incredibly prevalent among young kids with up to forty percent of kids have had at least three of them by the time that they reach there third birthday, and more than seventy five percent of kids will have had at least one by that point in time as well.
Fortunately, ear infections are typically very easy to treat, requiring nothing more than a round of antibiotics and a few days of rest. They are also not contagious, meaning that you child can go back to school or daycare as soon as their fever drops and they feel well enough to do so. Asking what to feed sick kids is a good question still, however, as having an ear infection can make eating painful (when it comes to swallowing) for a large number of afflicted children.
Colds are also commonly seen in urgent care locations, as there are up to one billion of them in the American population each and every year. The average child is even likely to contract as many as ten colds in this same span of time, again due to the fact that their immune systems are still in the process of fully forming. While colds are not dangerous, they can make children uncomfortable and urgent cares can help.