If you live in the United States, it is likely that there is an urgent care in your neighborhood. It’s even likely that you have gone to that urgent care location yourself. After all, recent data on the subject even shows that more than one quarter of the population of the United States has visited an urgent care center at least once over the course of the last two years or so. In addition to this, up to three million people attend various urgent care locations over the course of a single week, urgent cares that now require the employment of up to 20,000 doctors in order to remain fully staffed and operational and sometimes even more medical professionals than that. More and more, you can find doctors who have chosen to work at a local urgent care clinic and the quest to find doctors who can provide more than adequate medical care is something that has become easier and easier to do than ever before.

But why, exactly, have urgent care clinics become so widely and even wildly popular? For one thing, they’re accessible. As mentioned above, it’s easier to find doctors working at them than ever, and when you can find doctors you can find necessary care. Of course, it’s not just about the ability to find doctors but the ability to find doctors during convenient hours for the patient in question. Fortunately, the typical medical clinic is open far more frequently than your average general care doctor’s office would be. In fact, up to 85% of all urgent care centers are open every single day of the week. And if you’re looking to find doctors in early morning or evening, you’ll have much more luck at an urgent care center as well.

And when you go to an urgent care clinic, you’ll be able to find doctors that can handle a wider array of medical concerns than you might have originally thought. For instance, you’ll find doctors that can deal with both injuries and illnesses alike. Wound repair is, by and large, the most common form of injury seen in most urgent care locations. In addition to wound repair, various respiratory infections are more commonly seen than any other illness at all. Of course, many other injuries are also treated. Ankle sprains, which occur up to 25,000 times over the course of just one single day here in the United States alone, are so commonplace that many people find doctors in urgent care locations that have a breadth of experience in treating them. And it’s easy to find doctors in walk in clinic settings that provide fracture care as well, as up to 80% of all urgent care locations in this country have the tools to provide exactly this, something that might come as a surprise to many people out there.

In addition to treating fractures and sprains, treating sunburn and various other skin conditions is also something that you’ll find doctors to do in an urgent care setting. After all, sunburns are quite common during the summer months in particular, and getting a serious sunburn is actually far easier than many people realize until it happens to them. In fact, it takes only just 15 minutes of exposure to unprotected skin for a sunburn to set in, and sunburns can become serious quickly if no action or form of protection is given. If you think that your sunburn is at risk of infection or too painful to deal with on your own, having it looked at by a professional in an urgent care setting is likely to be the ideal next step.

Ultimately, if you need medical treatment but are looking to avoid the emergency room (where wait times are long and costs are incredibly high), the urgent care location nearest you is likely a great option. Urgent care centers have become more widespread than ever, and are even able to treat up to 97% of all cases that come into them. This means that less than a full 5% of all cases ever need to be seen in an emergency room setting, something that can save time and money.