If your child is sick or hurt, it’s hard to think about anything else. One thing that you should think about, however, is whether your child requires emergency care or can be effectively treated by an urgent care pediatric clinic in North Charleston, SC. Here are some questions to consider.
How Severe Is the Illness or Injury?
This is the most important question to ask when deciding whether your child should go to the emergency room or an urgent care facility. Emergency care is for conditions that pose an imminent threat to life or limb. Urgent care is for conditions that are not life-threatening but still require immediate medical attention.
What Are Potential Benefits of Using Urgent Care?
Some parents bring their children to the emergency room even when their conditions do not warrant emergency care because they believe they will be treated more quickly. In fact, the opposite is usually true. Emergency rooms treat the patients with the most serious conditions first. If your child’s complaint is not a true emergency, you will likely be waiting in the emergency room for a long time, whereas an urgent care clinic will often be able to treat your child more quickly. Because urgent care does not provide services at the critical care level, an urgent care visit usually costs considerably less than an emergency room visit as well.
When Is Urgent Care Available?
Not all urgent care clinics see patients at the same time of day. Some provide same-day appointments during regular office hours to treat patients whose family physician is unable to see them that day. Other urgent care providers are open after hours to see patients when their family physician’s office is closed. It’s important to research different urgent care providers and to know ahead of time when your chosen urgent care pediatric clinic in North Charleston, SC will be open.
The best thing to do for your child is to educate yourself and make contingency plans before your child becomes sick or injured, so you know where to go when the need arises. Visit charlestonpalmettopediatrics.com to get more information.
