I get that a&e is busy, but was not expecting to be spoken to so rudely

My son put something inside his ear at preschool when he was 3 years old. I took him to the GP, who looked inside his ear, confirmed there was indeed something stuck and sent us straight to A&E.

It was the fact you told her that a 'friend who's a medical professional looked inside your ear'. At that point the nurse stopped listening, because you hadn't been to YOUR GP to make that confirmation.

It was rather unprofessional to be honest. I suspect that they do see people who've had a medical professional friend do XYZ, and have been wrong, so it's made her skeptical.

I'd imagine it would be more of a Minor Injuries Unit issue than A&E. I would go to your GP, and get it confirmed and you referred to whichever (A&E/MIU) your GP thinks is best. My local MIU need a referral from either the NHS online or a GP, before they will see you. Yours though could be different.

OP there’s an awful lot of misinformation being spoken on here and an alarming lack of empathy!
I had a very similar situation and my GP sent me to A&E (yes he said A&E) at 8.45 pm. The A&E and MIU are both booked in by the same reception.
A very nice nurse practitioner in MIU removed the item whilst cheerfully saying oh we do these all the time!

A&e is no longer one department, to help flow there are often many different areas you are sent to ( often by streaming or triage) which may include:

Minor injuries
Same day emergency care: medical/surgical
minor injuries
Urgent care/GP

Plus the usual Majors, resus etc.
I don’t think op was unreasonable to be honest as it was causing her pain. Not sure a gp would deal with it. It could be embedded too.

However i can also see the nurses point when people go to ED with chronic issues that have already lasted days: that they could of initially seen a gp for ( even if they send you to them afterwards). Nurses will query why they’ve decided to come now. Nurses are trained to triage and some are trained to deflect as needed. There is no need to be rude though and i have also experienced a blunt triage nurse and it wasn’t pleasant when you are already feeling apprehensive.

She's probably on her last run of night shifts and just wants to get home. Still wasn't great taking it out on you.

YANBU. She really didn’t have to be like that. And it sounds (from people on here who know better than me) like she was wrong, which is worrying.
I was in a busy a and e on a Friday night recently and, while they were clearly massively overstretched, all staff were at worst civil and in most cases very pleasant and polite.

It really isn’t. People are waiting on corridors because there is no flow through the hospital and they can’t get a bed. The people in minors who don’t need to be there aren’t causing corridor care. They might be causing crowding and adding to triage workload but they are not the reason for people waiting 40 hours on a trolley.

Yes. We would get a letter in a week or 2 saying appropriate reasons to attend a+e.

Nobody on here ever thinks you should go to A&E unless maybe you've been decapitated and even then it's a stretch!

I've been once, when I was told to, because I had the beginnings of signs of a life threatening reaction to a new medication, and I was made to feel like a right idiot throughout.

But then you went home!

I'm not saying you should be spoken to rudely but if that was all it took to send you home you cant have been that worried.
Have you gone back this morning or have you contacted your GP?

👏🏻 exactly. A GP can refer urgently to ENT, contact the on call ENT doctor and arrange a same day appointment, or signpost to the MIU. Even an OOH GP at the hospital would’ve been a better option.

My husbands urgent referral to ENT is on month 7 of waiting. So I wouldn’t have bothered with that. Minor injuries was probably right so I’d have just told her the GP had refused to see me and sent me there.

Your doctor will then refer you to the hospital. It might even be to a+e but with an appointment for removal. Not in the normal waiting list.

You did what you were advised to do. She shouldn't have been rude though - there's a way of telling you you should have gone to GP. Having said all that, if I was in a lot of pain, I'd have waited it out. Unless you're already there, our A&E would already be busy at this time. Assuming you get someone sympathetic this morning, might be worth telling them what happened last night.

It’s because you said it had been there for a few weeks so in her mind she was thinking in all that time you didn’t think to go see a GP? Which is actually kind of valid. A&E is for out of hours care or serious injuries / illnesses that require hospital rather than a GP.

Are people that thick that they can’t read and grasp what the OP has written? A&E and minor injuries are in the same place, my local hospital is set up exactly the same. They triage you and send you to the appropriate place depending on your injury. OP was not abusing resources or wasting anyone’s time.

Its not as simple as that they will need the actual tools to be able to remove it.

My local hospital which has really good wiating times for everything (got a routine scan in a week) say that if you can decide not to come to a+e right now and you can choose to come at a more convenient time for you, then it isn't an emergency. Go see a GP.

What the heck is “hot clinic”?

I did an ENT (ear, nose and throat ) job many years ago, and if someone had contacted us about this, we would have told you to come back in the morning to a "hot clinic" to look in your ear and remove.
111 should not have told you to go to A&E, unfortunately they do this a lot.

And what the NHS doesn’t need is people like you giving out false advice which could lead to serious ear problems and longer ENT wait lists.

I would just go back to A&E now, you need that tsken out assp. Take whatever you need and be prepared to wait a long time.

The delay actually doesn't matter except in increasing the urgency of the situation. The nurse was just plain wrong.

Things in ears which are causing pain need A and E if there is no MIU, as it's a VERY rare GP who will have the skill, tools and/or inclination to attempt a removal, especially of something so small from an inflamed and possibly infected ear. 111 were correct and the nurse was wrong.

It sounds exhausting and she could probably have removed it in the time it took to complain about how someone with a minor injury ended up in Minor Injuries.

So where do you think she should go after she was triaged by 2 medical professionals to go to miu. 111 told her then the hospital triage desk also told her. Why do you think the nurse who spoke to her like shit is correct but the 2 other medical professionals she spoke to are wrong

Don’t be ridiculous. If you have a foreign object in your ear which you can’t remove you have to go to A&E or MIU. The triage desk which she was at decides which.