Urgent Care Research Paper

Introduction
Past generations viewed urgent care as the neighborhood physician making visits to their home, and administering the medication needed for a full recovery. Later years, urgent care was viewed as emergency transport to a hospital with a triage and trauma center for emergency care. Today, urgent care has a whole new meaning. Emergency rooms are now for extreme emergencies; such as a heart attack or a stroke. This is when the urgent care centers were born, to take on cases the emergency room cannot handle. In this paper, the significant trends of urgent care will be examined: how has it changed the delivery of healthcare, how has this change impacted the quality of care, did societal beliefs and values influence change, and how
Urgent care is pushing the boundaries of the quality of care that can be provided in an urgent care facility. According to the American Academy of Urgent Care Medicine (2014), “Since 2008, the number of facilities has increased from 8,000 to 9,300. The public’s desire for immediate access to medical care has been the driving force behind this monumental growth” (AAUCM, 2014). Urgent care facilities have begun volunteering to become accredited organizations, meaning that they will now be held to the highest standards of quality. This will now assure that the care being provided to patients in an urgent care facility will match the care one would receive in an emergency room. The increase in urgent care facilities becoming accredited greatly enhances the attraction for some of the best providers. This brings in highly qualified physicians who have a strong drive to practice medicine in an urgent care setting. Meaning not only do patients get access to highly trained physicians and an accredited care facility; they also have the availability of that facility on nights, weekends, and holidays. The increase in accessibility benefits the urgent care facility. More often than not when a patient shows up to an urgent care facility their wait will be under an hour, and they will be able to see an actual physician. As urgent care medicine continues to progress in the health care
The view of Learning Team A on the expense is reflected in the cost comparison between that of an emergency room (ER) and urgent care facility (UC) for several common reasons of a visit; earache $400 (ER)/$110 (UC), sore throat $525 (ER)/$94 (UC), and urinary tract infection $665 (ER)/$110 (UC) (Debt, 2014). Insurance companies, along with their members, value the lower cost of urgent care facilities. Insurance companies reward their members by requiring a lower co-pay for a visit to an urgent care facility over that of an emergency room; one member of Learning Team A shared that she has a co-pay of $275 for a visit to the emergency room versus $50 for a visit to an urgent care facility. To further confirm the view of Learning Team A in regard to the bridge between immediate care and wait time of a physician, a national survey in 2007 of 436 eligible urgent care facilities, “more than two-thirds of urgent care centers open prior to 9:00 am during the week, with significant proportions doing so on Saturday (45.7%) and Sunday (31.1%)” (BMC, 2009, p.