You never like to think about a family member hurting themselves or getting sick. However, it’s something that happens occasionally. The only question is what you’ll do if it ever happens, and they need you to take them somewhere for treatment.

A Clinic

A clinic could be your first option. You can find clinics in most major cities. You might look into one like Hillcroft Physicians in Texas.

With one of these clinics, you can usually get specialty care, diagnostics, and family medicine. They typically have a pharmacy on-site as well.

Clinics might seem ideal if you don’t have great health insurance or have no insurance at all. Some operate for free, and they are there for underserved communities.

The only issue is that they can become very crowded sometimes since anyone who’s sick or hurt and does not have insurance might go there. If you want faster service, you may have to head to an emergency room or urgent care facility instead.   

An Emergency Room

If your family member has something urgently wrong with them, you probably can’t go to a clinic. A clinic is not usually as well suited to help with a dire emergency as what you’ll find at a hospital emergency room.

If you go to a hospital emergency room, you should find doctors and nurses who can quickly help your family member if their life is in danger or you suspect that could be the case. They will have X-ray or MRI capabilities. If they figure out your family member needs emergency surgery, they can start on that and hopefully save their life.

Emergency rooms are probably the most expensive option on this list, though. If you feel that your family member’s life is in danger, you have little choice but to take them to one. If you don’t have great health insurance, you can easily rack up a hefty bill there that you’ll need to deal with at some point.

If you called 911 and got them to send an ambulance to take your family member to the emergency room, you will need to pay for that as well. If you feel like it’s possible, you can always save a little money by driving your loved one to the emergency room or getting an Uber instead. Your family member’s condition will determine whether you feel this is a viable option.

A Doctor’s Office

You can set up a doctor’s office appointment if you have a family member who says they feel sick or they’ve hurt themselves, but you don’t feel like their life is in immediate danger. If your family has a doctor who they see regularly, you can call and see if they have an opening for an appointment that same day.

If they do, you can take your family member there, and the doctor will already know them. The doctor can quickly pull up their chart and look at their medical history to see if that can indicate what’s going on with them.

Most people would prefer to visit a doctor they already know instead of seeing a stranger at a clinic or in an emergency room. Again, you and your family member must choose which option seems reasonable based on how they feel.   

An Urgent Care Facility

An urgent care Windsor co (or in your location) facility is one more potential option for an ailing family member. More of these facilities keep popping up all over the country these days. Some are stand-alone entities, but most belong to chains, not dissimilar to chain restaurants.

At an urgent care facility, you get some of what you’ll find at the standard clinic and also the typical emergency room. For instance, your family member might get an X-ray on an injured ankle. However, the urgent care facility will not be able to give them an MRI if they have an intolerable headache.

An urgent care facility might be a suitable choice if your family member feels poorly but they don’t think their symptoms warrant an emergency room visit. Going to an urgent care facility could mean you end up paying hundreds of dollars for care rather than the thousands you might have to pay following an emergency room visit.