Lack of Planning on Your Part...

[thessalian]

...does not constitute an emergency on mine!

I am being shifted to yet another new department next week. It's a bit like Pass the Parcel. Still, I'm not precisely sorry. I cannot get out of this one fast enough. Today is one of those days where I just want to kill EVERYONE.

So I'm working my way through the backlog (it started mid-August. I have got us to mid-late October. I think I'm doing well) when I get approached by the consultants' lone registrar. He points out to me a list of letters that are absolutely urgent and must be typed RIGHT AWAY. Fiiiiiine, I'll abandon the backlog and type the letters that are soooo urgent that they simply cannot wait.

- One of them is dated 26 October.
- Half of them were dictated ad hoc despite being clinic letters and thus have no information attached to them on the system, obliging me to dig through notes for appropriate addresses.
- Half of those have had the notes taken away, or never had any delivered in the first place.
- One doesn't even have a name or a hospital number, as the consultant decided to see a patient who was never booked into clinic in the first place and just randomly dictated a clinic note without really attaching it to anything. So he dictated a name that I'm not sure I'm spelling right and that was it; no hospital number, no date of birth, nothing.

Don't get me started on the lady from our sister hospital insisting that of course I can get medical records, notorious for sitting on its collective tuckus and being as unhelpful as possible, to deliver a set of notes that might not even be in medical records in the first place to my office (which is in a different building) within the next ten minutes. Or the multiple patients who insist I am 'not being very helpful' when I do not take 'I will give the doctor the message' to mean 'I will track him down, nail his feet to the floor and then hold him at gunpoint until he returns your phone call'. Or the fact that we have swapped radio stations to Magic. Or that the women with whom I am sharing an office are now singing along. Or that conversation that the clinic clerk who passed through here yesterday was having with the rest of the office about how "I got no problem with gays; some of my best friends are gays. But I don't hold with what they get up to in the bedroom; it grosses me out" and how famous people coming out are only doing it for the publicity and "then there are the ones who just can't make up their minds..."

Someone please explain how my brain hasn't just plain blown up by now...

Comments

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

I can't explain it to you, because my brain wants to explode just from reading about it.

[jenncatt.livejournal.com]

'Scuse the comment from a totally random stranger (and fellow-NHS med sec), but this post bears an uncanny resemblance to so much of my working week that it's quite spooky - the only thing being that I'm not temping/floating anymore, so I'm stuck with the insanity in here long-term. People who don't work in the NHS never believe half the stuff that goes on around here, oddly enough.

But, gawd, I do feel your pain -
Majorly, trying to get any doctor to return a call. I have developed the weary feeling that even at gunpoint (and/or nailed to the floor), they'd still rather have a strop about patients harrassing them then actually call them back. And somehow the patients never wise up to this: the clinicians are God and the secretaries are evil minions trying to come between them and their beloved doctor. (note to patients: be extra-nice to consultants' secretaries and we appreciate the rarity of it so much that we can actually work miracles for you occasionally.)

Gah, the never-ending radio wars - we did Heart versus Magic for a while; Heart upped the game and expanded their playlist to include stuff other than endless 70s disco so are slightly more bearable than Magic these days (I'm still mourning the long-ago days when we were allowed XFM occasionally *sigh*). There is still much singing along though... I also can't for the life of me deal with the endless revolving conversation about reality TV that only varies according to whether TOWIE is currently showing new eps or not. I wish to god I didn't know what TOWIE stood for, but that knowledge is burned into my brain and cannot be erased now.

One thing I will say has improved the insanity of clinic typing has been digital dictation... the doctors are now forced to type the patient name at least onto the sound file *all by themselves*, and we can see what date it was dictated if nothing else (also: no tapes getting kicked under the photocopier anymore. I don't miss that at all.).

Sorry for the essay ;o) It is reassuring though to know that it's not just me who finds working this way a tad *ahem* frustrating...

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

I do not mind essays at all, particularly when they come with a double-helping of 'SOMEONE FEELS MY PAAAAAAAAIN!' (oh gods, when they put tapes somewhere stupid and shuffle the pile so you can't see it and it doesn't get done for two weeks and then they BLAME YOU, doctors argh). However, I'm just so curious as to how you happened to stumble over this particular entry when we only have one LJ friend in common. How did you find me? :)

[jenncatt.livejournal.com]

I think you popped up on Cleolinda's friends page as far as I remember, which I was reading randomly (can never remember how to flag LJ names on here, sorry!). Never did get around to adding her as a friend but I do read her LJ all the time... So it's Six Degrees of Cleolinda basically :o)

It just tickled me that I ended up quoting your post title to my very harassed colleague today as we sat staring at a screen full of dictations flagged as urgent, and some of them had just been dictated today from... June.