If you’ve ever arrived at the emergency room with an urgent medical concern, you know how frustrating it can be to sit in a waiting room while you continue to suffer. Emergency rooms these days are just too overcrowded, and they often fail to treat the specific ailments that you are facing.

Urgent care facilities have revolutionized the emergency care process, making it faster and easier to receive immediate medical attention. Emergency room visits are typically quite expensive, and you can be waiting for several hours before even speaking with a doctor. Walk-in health clinics are much less expensive than emergency rooms, yet they offer immediate treatment to address your urgent medical needs.
Your health should always be your top priority, and you should not be at the mercy of a crowded waiting room that prevents you from receiving fast treatment. Here are just a few of the many reasons that you should skip the emergency room and head to a local urgent care clinic instead:

• Help avoid ER overcrowding
  Emergency rooms in hospitals were designed to help patients suffering from traumatic ailments such as cardiac arrest or broken bones. In recent years, more patients have started to visit the ER in non-emergency situations. This makes it harder for doctors to care for those who are in life or death situations. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 129.8 million people go to the emergency room each year. Many of those patients could have just as easily been seen in an urgent care, which would help to quell the rampant overcrowding of ER rooms in the U.S.
• Save time and money
  While you’re certainly helping hospitals to administer better care by choosing an urgent care center, you’re also helping yourself. In fact, the average ER patient would have saved about $784 and nearly three hours of their time by going to an urgent care center instead. Certain ailments and injuries require hospital care, but a large percentage of common ER treatments are also offered by physicians in urgent care facilities.
• Treat a wide range of ailments
  Walk in clinics are ideal for ailments that need immediate medical attention but do not threaten your life. For example, the most common diagnosis at urgent care centers is an upper respiratory infection. You may not be able to do much with a sore throat, but you also wouldn’t want to sit in an ER waiting room for two hours just to receive an antibiotic. Urgent care clinics also offer STD testing and other services that cannot be found in an ER.

Living in pain and agony is no fun, but it’s even worse when you have to overpay for treatment after sitting in an ER for hours on end. Find a trusted urgent care clinic in your area and be prepared for the next time you or a loved one needs immediate medical attention.