Perhaps a child has fallen from a high place and is wailing in pain; maybe someone is sporting an unnaturally high fever; or there’s been an accident, and there’s blood everywhere. That’s the time you have to make a snap decision – should you head to the emergency room, an urgent care facility, or call the family doctor?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that in 2014, there were 136.3 million emergency room visits. Of those, 40.2 million were injury-related, with just 11.95 million resulting in hospital admission. About 2.1 percent of those who visit the ER are transferred to a different hospital (psychiatric or other).
Yes, that’s a lot of visits. And just 27 percent of those 136.3 million visits resulted in seeing a doctor or nurse in fewer than 15 minutes. Which means there are a lot of people stacking up in the ER.
The National Center for Health did a study examining a subset of patients that visited an emergency room but weren’t admitted to the hospital. It discovered that 48 percent visited the emergency room because their doctor’s office was not open.
THE FACTORS TO CONSIDER
There are factors in play in those critical moments after an incident that may sway your decision on where to go. Some of them are too important to ignore, such as cost – it can be two to three times more expensive to be treated in an emergency room than at a doctor’s office. That’s why you don’t head to the ER every time you have a headache.