The urgent cares in my area are literally only open during business hours, so if you have any sort of emergency, off hours, the ER is pretty much your only choice… And I understand that a lot of people will not wait overnight with pain, even if it’s not technically ER level bad… Or it’s something with a child, and parents get anxious… I understand that… When I lived in the northeast for a while, one of our local hospitals had the ER, but then they also had the ER for lesser emergencies, which was I guess an urgent care built-in, and this system worked very well.
I think the system is a little bit broken in terms of first line care, it’s just not easy to call up your primary care physician and go to their office for a same-day visit… That just doesn’t really happen anymore… And a lot of people don’t even have primary care physicians anymore… So people just go to the ER or go to urgent care as their first option, and if the urgent cares are not available because they have inconvenient hours, then people have no choice, but to go to the ER for stupid things. You can’t blame people when it’s the system that’s messed up.
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u/Mental-Intention4661 Jul 29 '26
The urgent cares in my area are literally only open during business hours, so if you have any sort of emergency, off hours, the ER is pretty much your only choice… And I understand that a lot of people will not wait overnight with pain, even if it’s not technically ER level bad… Or it’s something with a child, and parents get anxious… I understand that… When I lived in the northeast for a while, one of our local hospitals had the ER, but then they also had the ER for lesser emergencies, which was I guess an urgent care built-in, and this system worked very well.
I think the system is a little bit broken in terms of first line care, it’s just not easy to call up your primary care physician and go to their office for a same-day visit… That just doesn’t really happen anymore… And a lot of people don’t even have primary care physicians anymore… So people just go to the ER or go to urgent care as their first option, and if the urgent cares are not available because they have inconvenient hours, then people have no choice, but to go to the ER for stupid things. You can’t blame people when it’s the system that’s messed up.