The value of urgent care is that it’s available all week and often in hours that extend before or after typical work hours. Urgent care is available on weekends, unlike your general practitioner’s office.
What happens when you have an after-hours emergency and need care? There’s no guarantee that the fever your child throws is going to conveniently time itself to arrive between the typical 9 to 5 hours your pediatrician keeps from Monday to Friday. You’re playing a pick-up basketball game with your friends and twisting your ankle, and it’s 9 p.m. on a Friday, so you’d have to wait all weekend to see your normal doctor. Urgent care is designed to help with these situations.
How Does an Urgent Care Center Help With After-Hours Emergencies?
Urgent care centers are a lower-cost option that eases some of the patient loads that hospital ERs used to handle. While urgent care doesn’t have all of the same equipment as a hospital, it has a lot of helpful equipment that provides care for minor injuries, infections, and diseases like the flu.
You can go to an urgent care center for an annual check-up, required physicals, vaccinations, boosters, and a lot more. It’s especially handy if your doctor is booked for months, but you don’t want to wait that long to get your flu shot. It’s also handy if you think you have a UTI and don’t want to wait all weekend to have a test to confirm it.
Common After-Hours Emergencies
While the list of things urgent care cannot handle may seem long, the problems and tests doctors and nurses can help with are much longer. You should go to urgent care for the following issues.
- Animal and insect bites
- Annual check-ups
- Back and neck pain
- Blood pressure readings and assessments
- Blood tests
- Burns that aren’t severe and sunburn
- Cuts and scrapes
- Dehydration and heat exhaustion
- Drainage of minor abscesses
- Ear and eye exams
- Female health issues
- Finger and toenail injuries, infected hangnails, and ingrown nails
- Flu, cold, and Covid diagnosis
- Headaches
- Indigestion
- Minor lacerations that need stitches
- Nose bleeds
- Pink eye and eye irritation
- Poison ivy and poison oak
- Puncture wounds
- Rashes and skin issues
- Respiratory issues
- Sports injuries
- Sprains, strains, and minor bone fractures
- STD testing and treatments
- Stomach and intestinal issues that aren’t severe
- Strep throat diagnosis
- Suspected ear and sinus infections
- Toenail removals
- UTIs
- Vaccinations and boosters
- Work, DOT, sport, or school physicals
If you’re not sure if your situation is an emergency or not, it’s okay to reach out and ask. The staff at urgent care can tell you whether you should go straight to the ER or not.
How Are Emergencies Handled?
Urgent care often has hours that extend beyond normal doctors’ offices. Plus, they’re open on weekends. Not every urgent care is open 24/7, but they do have telehealth options for convenience. If you can’t get a location before they close, you could use video chat to talk to a doctor and get help before you can get to your doctor.
When there is an abundance of patients to be seen, urgent care triages them just as a hospital ER does. A child with a high fever would take priority over an adult needing a flu shot. A person with a swollen ankle that’s believed to be a sprain might be lower in priority than someone who was attacked by a dog. When you go to urgent care, you need to expect to be prioritized based on the issue you’re having.
Another thing that people don’t often realize is that you might get referred to the ER. If that is necessary, the urgent care will do what the doctors can with the equipment they have and call the ER to state what they’ve done before you get there.
Suppose you go to urgent care with a swollen wrist after a fall. You think it’s sprained, but X-rays find that there is a bone fracture that needs to be realigned before it’s splinted. You would be referred to an ER for that.
If an urgent care center offers an option for online check-in, take advantage of it. It puts you on the waitlist before you leave your home. That can make sure you’re seen as quickly as possible, but a triage system is still used to determine the order in which patients should be seen.
Urgent care does depend on the staff, too. There may not be as many doctors available on a Sunday as on a Wednesday. As long as you remember that patience is required when it’s busy and that online check-in can save time, urgent care can be a time saver.
When Should You Go Straight to the ER?
Urgent care helps with many health issues and injuries, but there are some situations where the ER is best. They include:
- Badly broken bones or loss of movement
- Blood in the sputum
- Breathing difficulties
- Fainting/loss of consciousness
- Heat stroke
- Heavy bleeding and deep wounds
- High fever after taking fever reducers
- Intense dizziness that lasts
- Overdose
- Poisonings
- Seizures
- Severe allergic reactions
- Severe burns
- Sharp abdominal pains
- Signs of a stroke
- Smoke or chemical fume inhalation
- Stiff neck, headache, and high fever
- Sudden confusion
- Suicidal thoughts.
- Suspected heart attack
Emergency rooms are meant for emergencies, but not everything is an emergency. If you have an urgent care need that isn’t a matter of life or death, Premium Urgent Care is here to help with availability seven days a week. We’re open on Saturday and Sunday.
With two locations in Fresno, residents enjoy the benefit of being able to choose the most convenient location. Hours at the Milburn Avenue location are:
- Monday through Friday – 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
- Saturday – 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
- Sunday – 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The East Champlain Drive location is open until 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. It’s closed on weekends. There are also locations in Clovis (open 10 a.m. to 6:30 Monday through Saturday and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday). Finally, the Selma location’s hours are similar to East Champlain Drive’s hours, but it does offer Saturday hours from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Check in online before you leave and get on the waiting list to be seen by a doctor as quickly as possible. Premium Urgent Care also has telemedicine visits for prompt service if your medical issue is something you feel could be addressed through a video chat.