When Urgent Care Replaces Primary Care, Who Gets Left Behind?

How does access to primary care impact the trajectory of a person's health?

Primary care is the foundational infrastructure through which early detection, prevention, and coordinated management happen. Having a trusted primary care provider profoundly influences health, and those who do receive systematic screenings for chronic diseases, behavioral counseling, medication management, and referrals to specialists. But in many low-income communities, structural barriers, such as clinic shortages or inflexible work schedules, make it difficult to establish and maintain that relationship. Without primary care, people are more likely to enter the health care system only when illness is advanced or acute, resulting in worse patient outcomes and more expensive care for health systems.

What does the overuse of urgent care reveal about deeper inequities?

When urgent care clinics routinely diagnose uncontrolled hypertension, newly onset diabetes, and other serious, long-developing conditions, they are doing far more than their intended role of rapid, episodic care. This pattern signals that many patients, who are often in low-income communities, lack timely access to consistent primary care where prevention, screening, and chronic disease management are meant to occur. The over-reliance on urgent care exposes deeper inequities and system-level gaps in how care is organized and delivered to disadvantaged populations.

How can preventive health care become a priority?

Health promotion is often framed as an individual responsibility: remember to get screened, manage your nutrition, and exercise regularly. But this places additional burdens on those who may already be navigating economic stress and social pressures. Making preventive care a priority starts with recognizing how these conditions may limit some people's capacity to attend routine check-ups and follow through on recommended screenings. When health systems are designed to anticipate these realities, prevention shifts from a personal burden to a collective investment in long-term health.

Key question to take forward:

As you watch the video and consider your own setting, you might reflect on: 

Where do you see the greatest barriers preventing people from accessing the care they need, and what could you do to help remove them?

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