Urgent Care for Kids Questions and Answers

Urgent care is a convenient alternative for individuals seeking medical attention who either don’t have a family doctor or aren’t able to get into their family doctor for several days and require treatment right away. In urgent care, patients are seen on a first come, first-served basis by a general practice doctor or other medical professional trained and certified to diagnose and treat a vast assortment of medical conditions that are not life-threatening. Urgent care is often open seven days a week with hours extended beyond a typical doctor’s office and in some cases, they are even open 24 hours a day. Urgent care is a faster and less expensive alternative to a hospital emergency room and allows the emergency rooms to be kept more open for severe, life-threatening medical emergencies. Patients can go to urgent care to seek treatment for a wide variety of illness and injury symptoms including sore throat, cuts, fractures, sprains, ear infections, nausea and vomiting, fever and any other medical condition that is not life-threatening or a severe injury such as a broken bone protruding through the skin.

The right care option between urgent care or the emergency room is going to be dependent on your illness or injury. Life-threatening illnesses and injuries should always go immediately to the emergency room. This can include severe allergic reactions leading to anaphylactic shock, suspected heart attack, stroke and many other conditions that require the expertise and care of the wide assortment of doctors, surgeons and specialized doctors on staff in an emergency room. Patients without life-threatening conditions will still get treated through an emergency room, however priority is given to more severe cases so patients can be left waiting several hours for treatment. Urgent care is able to diagnose and treat mild to moderate illnesses and injuries, including completing necessary lab tests and x-rays in some urgent cares that have these services onsite. Patients are seen faster in urgent care as cases are prioritized in the order that they come in. Urgent care employs highly trained and skilled doctors who have experience in a general practice setting and are able to diagnose and treat the wide variety of conditions that they are exposed to every day.

Urgent care can treat any mild to moderate illness or injury in children. With children, some of the most common issues include bone fractures, cuts, sore throat, fever, vomiting, diarrhea, ear infections and sore stomach. An urgent care center is well set up to diagnose any and all of these ailments, with many centers having laboratory services and x-ray labs on hand to perform necessary tests to be able to perform and analyze a wide variety of tests. This allows the doctors on staff to fully and properly diagnose and treat the conditions that they see without having to send families off to other facilities for further tests.

Adult urgent care and pediatric urgent care provide the same overall care and treatment service levels, by treating a vast assortment of illnesses and injuries that are not life-threatening. The difference is in the training and experience of the doctor on staff, with a pediatric urgent care having doctors that have been trained specifically in pediatric medicine beyond their standard medical school training. This makes a pediatric urgent care more familiar and able to treat illnesses that are more common in children, as well as having the bedside manner and gentler touch required to work with the youngest demographic of patients who can be scared and harder to examine. Urgent care is set up to treat patients of all ages, although some clinics may have a pediatric doctor on staff specifically to care for younger patients.

We serve patients from College Park MD, New Carrollton MD, Falls Church VA, Acredale MD, and Old Town MD.