Americans young and old will suffer injuries, wounds, and illnesses during everyday life, and when a person suffers from illness or injury, a nearby responsible adult should be able to find local urgent care centers and take the victim there right away. This is especially true if an emergency clinic is needed, where life-threatening injuries or conditions can be treated. It may be noted that some urgent care centers and urgent care clinics are in fact hybrid clinics, meaning that they double as urgent care centers and emergency clinics. This makes them quite flexible and they can admit patients with any sort of medical problem. When a victim is suffering a medical issue, a responsible adult may use a PC or mobile device to look up local urgent care centers, if they don’t already know one, and find the addresses and hours of operation of local urgent care centers. Using the seeker’s ZIP code or their town or city name is a good way to narrow the search, although some devices automatically transmit their location. A search query such as “urgent care centers near me” may be sufficient. And what about the business aspects of urgent care clinics?
The Urgent Care Business
How to start an urgent care clinic? An urgent care startup may be a relatively easy business to launch, since there is always a need for urgent care centers and they may prove popular in any area. This may be especially true in rural areas that don’t yet have their own medical facility, so an entrepreneur may choose to build one. This means hiring contractors to construct the building, and later, staffing it with nurse practitioners and physicians who can run the facility and take care of any patients who arrive. A new urgent care center may launch a marketing campaign to raise awareness, especially in an area that didn’t yet have one.
Many thousands of these clinics can be found across the United States today, and they are often small, independent clinics built into strip malls or built into retailers or even hospitals. Such clinics might be linked into small, local networks at times. Those in strip malls are easy for patients to find and access, and this may boost traffic. A entrepreneur may take advantage of an opening in a strip mall and make a bid to build an urgent care clinic there, especially if the nearest existing clinic is far away.
Some urgent care clinics are built into hospitals, but it may be noted that the staff at such clinics, and the medical care that they provide, are distinct from those provided by the hospital at large. An interested patient may visit the clinic for care and leave without interacting with the hospital itself. This may be time-friendly and more cost-effective than dealing with the hospital at large, especially for minor medical cases that don’t call for a hospital’s ER or a doctor’s attention. Not all medical cases are life-threatening, after all.
Meanwhile, other clinics are retail clinics. They are built into larger retailers such as Target, Wal-Mart, and Walgreens, and often include a pharmacy. Shoppers may appreciate the convenience of stopping by these clinics to pick up prescription drug refills or other medicine, although the clinic’s hours may vary somewhat than the retailer’s own hours. Patients may want to check this ahead of time.
What sort of care is offered at an urgent care center? These centers are staffed by nurse practitioners and physicians who have the training and tools needed to treat a wide variety of ailments. Life-threatening, ER-worthy conditions are too much to handle here, but nearly anything less severe than that may be treated. Patients may get bandages and stitches for shallow cuts, and they may get lotion or ointment for skin problems such as rashes and bad sunburn cases. At these clinics, patients may get medicinal relief from the cold or flu, and four out of five such clinics also treat bone fractures. Most of these clinics also offer treatment for ankle and wrist sprains, such as joint braces. Many patients also visit these clinics for upper respiratory distress, and they may get relief from a stomach flu or food poisoning.