Emergency room or urgent care? When you should choose one instead of the other

Have you spent hours in the emergency room recently? You are not alone.

Flu season is causing a surge in patients at emergency rooms in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. People are spending most of their visits in the waiting room, with some waiting as long as 11 hours to be seen.

"The wait times are certainly higher this time of year everywhere that you go," Dr. Olivier Gherardi, medical director of Brown University Health Urgent Care, told NBC 10 News. "The emergency department is just really jam packed with sick patients."

While the surge is from flu patients, doctors say the long wait times are due to patients who go to the emergency room for mild symptoms. They say those people are using resources and making it harder for emergency room doctors and nurses to treat real emergencies.

https://turnto10.com/news/local/emerg...

#flu #sickness #fluseason #er #hospital #urgentcare
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