To expect more than one Doctor in A&E ??

[CrazyHamsterdisguisedasatree]

I'm at A&E with my Ds 4.8 as he fell & cracked his head open I could easily fit 3 fingers in the hole , he is back to himself now it has stopped bleeding .
We have been here over 2 hours & I just went to ask when he would be seen as not even been assessed yet , I was told that the only Doctor they have has at least 15 adult patients to see first .

I always thought their was a Doctor for the Adults & one for Children as its two seperate areas in the hospital .

I know our local hospital it's the a&e dr that sees everyone first inc kids and then if they need a second opinion from a paed they call one. But the paed doesn't automatically see all the children.

We have more than one Dr in a&e, but that's going to depend how big the hospital is.

Its a pretty big hospital as it covers a vast area .

I wouldn't of thought it if we weren't in a completely different area to the Adult area

We only have MIU here in our ends of the earth town. We have a nurse practitioner 'I'm so close to being a doctor, I think I am god and nurses, rarely a doctor on duty.

Our nearest A&E is 22 miles away.

However, children with head injuries seem to get priority and that is how it should be on the surface. You don't know how high priority the other patients are though.

Has the triage nurse looked at him?

When i took ds1 to a&e with a very similar injury they told me it's best for them to make you wait a while, for exactly the reason you state. He's back to himself now.

If they d seen you straight away anyonene would have been dazed/confused, by leaving it a while they get a better picture of how badly hurt he is.

Have to say when we did get seen they were absolutely brilliant with him

Why I'm glad when DD1 was ill we went to a children's hospital.

Did the triage nurse mean there is only one doc covering this type of injury. There may be another doctor or two covering 'majors' i.e collapsed patients/cardiac arrests/big trauma cases.

theres probably people dying that have to come first im afraid.

Wasn't seen by triage or anything , it was 1 Doctor for the whole of A&E

inneed of course people with more serious injuries take precident (sp)

I know there are severe recruitment problems in emergency medicine, but if you're in a major town, that seems badly understaffed

When we've been to a&e it was a nurse who triaged. I'd ask how long you can expect to wait until he is triaged.

It might be that there are more doctor's but they are busy with urgent cases.

We have kids a&e here sadly I was hurt awhile ago and was sent to a diff a&e and was only 1 doc on duty I got there at 7pm by ambulance and wasn't seen till 3am and by then the skin was dying off and I have lost a chunk out of my ear :( they even said I should have gone to my own a&e as they have plastic surgeons and would have been able to have done a better Job :(

They probably don't only have one doctor working in there. It is more than likely, IMO, that they have one doctor working in Minors, for things like you've described, and other doctors working in majors and resus.

It is a pain that you have to wait with kids, but that's the way it is sometimes. When DS2 dislocated his shoulder and broke it in 3 places we went straight through. People still moaned very loudly!