If you need medical attention, you have many viable options. You can always go to the emergency room at a hospital. You might also check out either a walk-in clinic or an urgent care facility.
If you need urgent care residents, then one of these facilities is likely your first choice. You should know, though, that there are some significant differences between an urgent care facility and a walk-in clinic. Knowing those differences should put you in the best position to choose the right one, so we’ll discuss them in detail right now.
What is a Walk-In Clinic?
A walk-in clinic is a kind of healthcare facility. If you go there, you can get basic medical care that is convenient and relatively affordable. You can expect to pay a lot less at a walk-in clinic than you would at certain other medical facilities, such as an emergency room.
One of the reasons why consumers tend to favor walk-in clinics is that they are often near pharmacies or similar retail outlets. This way, if you need medication after visiting the clinic, you should be able to get it with no problems.
What About an Urgent Care Facility?
An urgent care facility is a kind of walk-in clinic, but it does not serve precisely the same purpose. You’d be more inclined to go to an urgent care facility if you were experiencing a medical problem such as an infected finger, a cold that has troubled you for a while, or something else along those lines.
Urgent care, as the name implies, means you feel you should consult with a doctor urgently, but you don’t believe your life is in danger. If you thought your life was in danger, your best choice would still be the emergency room at a hospital. You usually go to an urgent care facility under your own power rather than calling for an ambulance to come pick you up.
The Key Differences Between These Two Facilities
You don’t usually visit a walk-in clinic if you feel like there’s anything seriously wrong with you from a health perspective. You can get a doctor to look at you and possibly prescribe you some medication, but you likely won’t go there if you’re sick or if you’ve injured yourself.
If you’re ill or you have sustained a minor injury, but not one you think is life-threatening, that’s when you’d likely go to an urgent care facility. That’s the main difference between urgent care and a walk-in clinic. Walk-in clinics are not generally considered to be a place you’d go for a medical problem of any urgency.
Walk-in clinics also usually have at least one certified doctor on the premises, and the same might not be true for an urgent care center. You can also expect some kinds of lab testing to be available at an urgent care facility, and you can get an X-ray there as well. You would not be able to say the same for a walk-in clinic.