Out of hours GP service

[Dr Noodle]

Yikes I meant nine hours in the waiting room alone not nine hours before getting a bed! It's not unusual to be sleeping on a trolley for a few days before you get admitted. There was a lovely old dear one time who after three days was offered to be sent to another hospital but she said she would stay where she was and wait because she was being treated so well. I just wanted to hug her, she was so sweet

That sounds really good that they improved the amount of staff. Would the target ever be a problem though ie people being seen too quickly and not examined thoroughly enough?

[Touche]

Yikes I meant nine hours in the waiting room alone not nine hours before getting a bed! It's not unusual to be sleeping on a trolley for a few days before you get admitted. There was a lovely old dear one time who after three days was offered to be sent to another hospital but she said she would stay where she was and wait because she was being treated so well. I just wanted to hug her, she was so sweet

That sounds really good that they improved the amount of staff. Would the target ever be a problem though ie people being seen too quickly and not examined thoroughly enough?

Yes, there is often pressure from managers and nurses to see patients quickly because they're in danger of 'breaching' the target. This can be especially difficult for newer doctors. The correct attitude should be that appropriate patient treatment matters more than the target and indeed patients with a clinical need (such as being sick as a dog and unsafe to move onto a standard ward from the resus room just because a government target says so) can be exempted from the target.

Inpatient teams hate the target because often patients are shifted into their wards without being seen by them in order to get them out of the A&E department before the 4 hours is up. This can clog up inpatient beds as patients who might have been able to go straight home from A&E if a specialist team had seen them are admitted regardless. This then clogs up the A&E department as there are no beds to move the next patients into!

Edit: Oh and here nobody should be waiting 9 hours just to be seen. You'll often get people moaning "when am I going to be seen? I've been here 5 hours and haven't been seen yet", take a look at their details and see they 'only' pitched up 2 hours ago. Tempting to make them see what a 4 hour wait feels like... :P

On an average day where I work I pick up cards around the 1:30-2 hour mark to be seen. On a good day it's down to 30-45 mins, on a bad day it can be 2:30-3 hours, 4 hours is the max time it'll take to get OUT of the department.