A Comparative Analysis of Emergency Room, Urgent Care Centers and Physician Office Visits

Katherine Ebrahim, Verrazzano Class of 2025, completed major in Nursing 

For my capstone project I reviewed literature on the utilization of the Emergency room (ER), Urgent Care centers (UCC) and Physician offices (PO). The aim of this literature search was to analyze why patients may choose to go the ER over UCCs and POs, and explore how health care professionals can guide patients to the appropriate care settings and provide solutions to direct patients to the best option. Each of these three locations provide a slightly different service. Comparing the overlap and fine tuning their use can result in better overall care to patients.

A large factor that affects patients is access to care. If patients are in a location where they only have an ER as a close option for care, they might choose to go there even when an UCC would suffice. If a person’s PO or UCC is closed at the time that they are seeking care they would be forced to go to the ER for medical treatment or risk not being able to receive any care.

Ensuring that UCC’s remain open to patients can allow them to seek treatment. It is also important to remember that some patients do not have regular visits with a health care professional. This lack of connection to a primary care physician may be the cause of a lack of access to PO visit.

This data could help to identify when each location is used, and how accurately patients are selecting the appropriate location to visit. This can lead to improving patient decisions through healthcare guides and decreased unnecessary ER visits.

I chose this area of research because the ER is something I am very passionate about. I was also interested in how to help both patients and the health care team. The research for this project was very interesting and there were a variety of papers that I found compelling. Learning more about this topic and being about to speak about it to friends and family has made me appreciate the patients that ER workers have to treat. I found it surprising how many articles I was able to find on my topic because I was worried I wouldn’t find enough. Overall, I have learned that researching about a topic you are interested can be rewarding and teach you more about your topic.