Many people give up thing in the season of Lent. Some give up chocolate, others give up screen time. This year, you are going to try giving up something that is taking far too much of your time on most days. You are no longer going to Find Your Friends. Not in a literal sense, of course, but you have decided that the amount of time you spend tracking the where about of your husband, your 18 year old daughter and your 22 year old daughter has gotten out of hand. More out of a sense of security and curiosity than anything else, you have gotten to the point where you check on the location of especially your daughters on an hourly basis. You have pretended that you wanted to know when your older daughter made it home at night after going to the bars with friends and knowing that your younger daughter who is a freshman in college is back at her dorms. The reality, however, is that it has become a time consuming and worry inducing habit. Knowing that they have always called when they were really in need of help, however, means that the amount of screen time you spend and the amount of worry that you create is becoming counter productive.
On the third day of Lent, however, you did get a phone call that created a real sense of urgency. Your younger daughter who is college 12 hours from home called to say that she was at a walk in clinic near campus. She had recently spend a long weekend at a hunting and fishing camp with a group of her friends and came home with three family curious kinds of bites. After being kept awake last night from the itching and the inflammation, she decided that a trip to the closest walk in clinic was in order.
You hung up the phone knowing that she would call you back with the results of the visit, but kicking yourself that you did not know she had been in distress. A few minutes later, however, you realized that if you had known for the Find My Friends app that she was at the walk in clinic, you likely would have suspected something much worse than bug bites. In the end, you took a deep breath, went back to the morning’s task of completing the laundry and congratulated yourself on not making your phone surveillance such a time sucking habit.
Walk In Clinics Offer a Number of Important Services
With the increase in the number of Americans who have access to health insurance through the Affordable Care Act there are more and more patients who are willing to proactively get the care that they need. As a result, there are many indications that urgent care clinics across the country are busier than ever. From treating bug bits after a weekend of camping to providing x-rays after a sports related injury, there are many times when it is simply easier to visit a walk in clinic than a family physician or pediatrician and less expensive than visiting a hospital emergency room.
One of the greatest advantages to a walk in clinic is that patients do not need to call ahead for an appointment. Because there are now as many as 20,000 doctors who practice urgent care medicine today means that the average wait time at most of these clinics is only 20 minutes. Factor in the statistic that nearly 85% of these clinics are open seven days a week and you begin to see just how accessible these clinics are to people with busy lives and schedules. According to the latest research, the most common diagnosis in an urgent care center was upper respiratory condition, and the most common procedure was wound repair in the year 2012. And while there certainly are many reasons that a patient may visit one of these walk in clinic, the research shows that after respiratory issues, the second most common complaint heard in doctor’s offices is dizziness. In fact, this is a condition that will occur in 70% of the nation’s population at sometime in their lives.