What is the difference between Emergency and Urgent care?

Emergency room and urgent care are services utilized for the immediate treatment of a patient. Depending upon the issue and the severity, you need to know the appropriate place to go in the event of an injury or health-related problems.

For example, if you are experiencing chest pains, you should go to the emergency room. Emergency rooms have an expert medical staff there to provide medical assistance to anything serious. However, if you trip over something in your house and end up with a cut on your face or a sprained ankle, you should go to urgent care.

Urgent care centers typically provide care for non -life-threatening conditions. Treatment in urgent care is also less expensive. However, the emergency room is available 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

Emergency and urgent care are two types of services given to people who need instant treatment due to certain medical conditions or injuries. In the past, when injured people are taken to a hospital, they will be taken to the emergency room of that hospital depending on the seriousness of the condition. However, hospitals are now using urgent care centers to attend to patients with non-life-threatening conditions. That is why if you are having an emergency problem, they might take you to an urgent care room instead of an emergency room. On the contrary, emergency rooms are for patients with life-threatening conditions such as cardiac arrest, persistent vomiting, difficulty in breathing, head injury, uncontrolled bleeding, etc. Urgent care centers are less equipped compared to emergency rooms. The facilitates in the emergency room are always available 24 hours a day. On the contrary, urgent care centers can only provide treatment for patients for some hours.

When you say emergency, you are referring to a life or death situation. Those who are usually brought to the emergency room would need to be admitted or would need to be given immediate care so that their lives can be saved. Those who go to urgent care would also need immediate care but they are usually for less urgent situations. For example, someone who is brought to the hospital for a critical gunshot wound would need to go to the emergency room so that surgery and other medical treatments can be done to save the patient’s life. Someone who has a sprain can get urgent care so that the situation will not be aggravated.