When To Choose a Free-Standing Emergency Room

When you find yourself in an emergency medical situation, do you choose a nearby free-standing emergency room? Or do you head to an emergency department that’s attached to a hospital?

Let’s take a look at some of the advantages associated with each choice.

Free-Standing Emergency Room

You may be tempted to think of a free-standing emergency room as the same thing as an urgent care facility. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Free standing ERs aren’t physically attached to a hospital, but they offer many of the same services. These facilities are open 24 hours a day and are staffed by doctors, nurses and lab technicians with special training in emergency medicine. These teams can perform most emergency services and have access to blood tests and advanced imaging tools, including X-rays, ultrasounds and computed tomography. For most emergencies, you can’t go wrong with making this choice.

Among the advantages:

• Shorter wait times: Free-standing emergency rooms don’t receive critical patients by ambulance. Instead, those patients are transported to hospital-based ERs, where they tend to take up a greater proportion of services and are usually the first to receive medical attention. That means you should have less competition from other patients in dire need of care.
• Faster attention: Even before you get to see the doctor, you are likely to receive quicker initial attention from nurses, who can get the treatment process started earlier because they aren’t busy with critical care cases.
• More face time: Doctors at free-standing facilities are unlikely to be as rushed as their hospital-based counterparts. That gives you a better chance of being seen by a doctor with more time to sit down and discuss your case and care options.
• More convenient: Free-standing emergency rooms are often in areas designed to maximize patient access. Depending on where you live, it’s likely that your drive will be shorter than if you choose a hospital ER.

Hospital Emergency Room

For anyone experiencing a life-threatening emergency – stroke, heart attack or severe trauma, for example – a hospital ER may be the better option because of greater access to resources. A free-standing ER can diagnose most patients just as quickly as a hospital ER. But the latter has immediate access to a broader range of treatments that may be needed for severe conditions.

Among the advantages:

• Specialized care: In addition to emergency doctors and nurses, a hospital ER also has quick access to the wide range of specialists working in the hospital. For complicated cases, your ER team can summon other professionals, including trauma surgeons, reconstructive surgeons, cardiologists, OB-GYN doctors and pediatricians for consultations.
• Expanded imaging options: In addition to the offerings found at most free-standing ERs, hospital facilities also have magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. These are valuable tools for assessing what’s happening inside your body.
• More treatment tools: Being attached to a hospital provides a significant boost in access to treatments. For example, there will be an onsite cardiac catheterization lab, where many heart conditions can be diagnosed and treated.
• Hospitalization: If needed, you can be moved upstairs to an available hospital room. A free-standing ER, on the other hand, would need to arrange a transfer if you require overnight (or longer) care.

Choosing Between the Two

It can be difficult to self-diagnose when you are experiencing a medical crisis. But if you’ve broken a bone, suffered a serious cut or are experiencing severe abdominal pain, a free-standing ER can quickly diagnose and treat you. If you fear you may be having a heart attack, stroke or other condition that will need immediate intervention, you are likely better off going to a hospital setting. However, there may be some instances where it’s important to put yourself in the care of an emergency team as soon as possible.

This content is not AI generated.