Emergency Pediatric Care Gwinnett
Our mission is to ensure that children are both happy and healthy.
(678) 501-5601
11975 Morris Rd Ste 330
Alpharetta, GA 30005
What is Considered Emergency Pediatric Care?
Go to the emergency pediatric care if your baby is less than two months old and has a bump, a bruise, or a fever. Urgent care centers don’t have the tools to evaluate or treat kids that young. In an emergency room, you can get help from a wide range of staff and specialists right away.
If your baby is older than two months, call the urgent care clinic ahead of time to make sure they can treat babies. Some clinics won’t take patients younger than a certain age. Make sure that the facility works with children and is comfortable treating them. When you call, be sure to talk to the doctor in charge and be clear about how your child is feeling. You don’t want to take your sick child to an urgent care center only to be told to go to the emergency pediatric care instead.
What common health problems in kids should be taken care of at the emergency pediatric care?
Head trauma
Even though most bumps, bruises, or cuts are minor and usually nothing to worry about, it can be hard to tell if your child has a concussion or if there is a deeper injury that needs immediate care. Skip the urgent care and go straight to the emergency pediatric care if the child is throwing up, seems confused, or keeps saying they are in pain.
How to Take Care of Head Wounds
You need to be somewhere that can keep an eye on a child for 24 hours. It might not need that—they might just send you home—but an urgent care can’t keep track of you in that way. In short, if your child has a head injury and needs to be somewhere other than home, it will be an emergency room or a hospital, so go there first.
Something stuck in the ear
This one makes you want to go to the emergency pediatric care which is sad but true. If it stays in there or if an angry child pushes it in further by accident, it can cause pain, an infection, or hearing loss. If you can’t see the object, it’s probably deep enough that you’ll need a professional who has worked with kids to get it out. The best place to go is the emergency room. Since kids are so creative, it’s a good idea to have the doctor check both nostrils and the ear canals at the same time.
Broken bones and/or deep wounds
At this point, you might start to worry about tendons getting hurt or even getting an infection. Go to the emergency pediatric care if the bone is sticking out or if there is a cut where you think you may have cut a tendon.
If you can’t move a joint or use it to build strength, like by squeezing, you’ve probably torn a tendon and need a specialist to fix it and check for other problems.
Stomach aches
A skilled doctor is needed to figure out if a child has appendicitis or an appendix that has burst and is in danger of becoming toxic. Go to the emergency room if your child has a fever, is throwing up, and has pain that starts around the belly button and moves to the right side.
A lot of heat
If your child’s temperature is over 104 degrees Fahrenheit, you should go to the emergency room. A fever that high can cause seizures or severe dehydration, which are both best treated in a hospital. Urgent care isn’t the place to go for seizures, and if your child is dehydrated and needs fluids through an IV, you’ll want someone who specializes in working with children to do it.
How to Treat a Fever in Children
Also, you should call a doctor if your child is less than 3 months old and has a fever over 100.4 degrees F, between 3 and 6 months and has a fever over 101 degrees F, or is older than 6 months and has a fever over 103 degrees F.
What are some common illnesses that can be treated at urgent care instead of emergency pediatric care ?
cough that won’t stop
A trip to the emergency room will cost more than an urgent care visit, your child will be exposed to more illnesses, and the wait is usually longer. For something like a cough that won’t go away, you should go to urgent care.
Urgent care should be able to do all the necessary x-rays to figure out what’s causing a cough that won’t go away and how to treat it. They should also be able to do follow-ups to see how things are going.
Getting sick from something you ate
This depends a lot on what the child swallowed and how they are acting at home. If your child is in danger of choking or has swallowed something that could hurt them, like a button battery or a detergent pack, call 911. Your child may need to be flown to the hospital. If your child tells you proudly from the back seat of the car that they ate a rock, the urgent care should be fine.
Your child may need x-rays and probably will need more x-rays 24 hours later, which is easy to do in urgent care and will get you out of there much faster.
Lip, brow, and/or chin splits
All of this depends on how deep the cut is and where it is. If the cut is very deep, you should go to the emergency pediatric care . This will make it possible for you to see a plastic surgeon. Most emergency pediatric care have topical anesthetics that can help a child feel less pain after they’ve been hurt.
But urgent care is fine if you have a cut that isn’t too bad.