If you need to see a doctor urgently but would rather not spend most of your day in the ER waiting room, a great alternative place to go to receive timely medical attention is an urgent care clinic! Like emergency rooms, urgent care clinics accept walk-in appointments. However, since urgent care clinics do not treat life-threatening medical emergencies, they can see patients on a first-come, first-served basis, significantly reducing the amount of time people spend in an urgent care clinic waiting room. According to the 2019 benchmarking report completed by the Urgent Care Association, over 90 percent of patients who visit an urgent care clinic can see a physician or medical professional within 30 minutes of their arrival! As such, an urgent care clinic is a much better alternative for any medical concern that is not a life-threatening emergency. If you are experiencing a life-threatening emergency, then it is imperative that you immediately go to your nearest emergency room, as urgent care clinics are not equipped to take adequate care of such medical concerns.

They certainly can! Here at Northwest Ohio Urgent Care, we provide treatment for all sorts of eye problems, whether you are suffering from pink eye (conjunctivitis), a different eye infection, or have sustained an eye injury, our physicians who are board-certified in both family and emergency medicine can provide first-rate medical attention for your eye problem.

For a health clinic to qualify as a legitimate emergency care alternative, it must accept walk-in appointments for patients with or without insurance or a primary care physician. Besides urgent care clinics, other examples of emergency care alternatives include retail health clinics and walk-in doctor’s offices. Retail health clinics are often in major pharmacies or retail stores and function similarly to a walk-in clinic. You can go to a retail health clinic for minor medical concerns, such as flu shots or a minor fever. A walk-in doctor’s office is a less advanced version of urgent care clinics, as they do not always staff board-certified physicians and provide medical attention for minor illnesses and injuries, such as asthma or an allergic reaction. In contrast, urgent care clinics always have at least one board-certified physician on staff, which allows them to provide more advanced services, such as animal bites, stitches, x-rays, and sprains.

While both urgent care and emergency rooms provide medical attention for patients that need it in a hurry, they differ in the scope and degree of services they are equipped to handle. As such, urgent care clinics are designed to take on the lion’s share of non-life-threatening medical concerns so that emergency room doctors and nurses can focus exclusively on saving lives.

If you are looking for an emergency care alternative near Bowling Green, Ohio, you can receive exceptional medical care at Northwest Ohio Urgent Care in Reynolds Toledo, OH! As with the emergency room, no appointment is required to see one of our fantastic doctors. All you need to do is come to 1421 S Reynolds Rd Toledo OH 43615, during the hours of 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM from Monday to Friday, and we will see you in short order!