Doctor's fucking punctuality

[AnotherTimeMaybe]

So went to doctor today and he was late again! Previous patient came late so he couldn't just chuck him out and he took me half hour later ,I was late for school pick up ended up paying late care
I don't get it, why are they allowed to be late we are supposed to accept it or leave and miss the appointment for which I had to take day off! And if we are late they wait for 5 minutes and then you go back to the bottom of the queue
AIBU ? Is this a life sentence?

purple have you considered that your son's consultant may have had a sick child of his own to deal with or stopped to help at an accident or any one of several scenarios. Did you ask him why he had been held up?

purple' they have wardrobes before clinics. If something needs doing on the ward, then it needs doing. The "messing about" could have been phoning a relative of a patient, phoning a patient, checking urgent test results, any number of things. They don't keep you waiting for the fun of it.

ChickensRideWest - "Probably because I didn't fling the 3 depressed patients in a row out of my room after 10 minutes."

SothatHappened - "Oh god are we that bad...us depressives. Genuine question...."

SoThat - I didn't read that as Chickens thinking we depressives are bad - my understanding of what she said is that she wasn't prepared to cut short the time her patients with depression needed, simply in order to meet the 10 minute appointment time.

Purplevase - doctors have to do ward rounds before their clinics, and often have to deal with emergencies on the wards, in A&E, or in theatre - they can't be in two places at once, and there aren't enough doctors to ensure that emergencies elsewhere won't hold up the start of clinics.

thefairy Are they going to Narnia?

I'm not in the UK so dont know if its different over there but here we tend to give the surgery a call before we head in for our appointment and they can tell us how far behind theyre running so you have a rough idea. My doctor is usually roughly 10-20mins behind but there is another doctor in town who is notorious for having 2+hour waits most times.

I bet they wish they were Grays,

Bloody iPad, I meant ward rounds!

Please accept my apologies. I did not mean to cause offence. I don't mind waiting if there are emergencies/seriously ill people who are obviously the priority. But I do think the communication could be better. I don't expect to be commanded to be on time and there to be no apology for long waits. Why can't the letters request Arriva on time and explain clinics may be delayed so expect to be at the hospital for up to x hours.

YUBVVU. I only go to the doctor with things they are that serious that I'm willing to wait as long as necessary for them to be addressed.

I understand that the NHS is pressurised and it's not all to do with cuts but more to do with the number of patients now registered to each practise and the fact that people go to the GP for things that could easily be addressed by the pharmacist or practise nurse.

Yabvu you don't know why he was late. If you were being told you had a life threatening condition or had gone in feeling surrcidle, would you need longer than 8 mins of consultation? Would you be mighty pissed off if you didn't get longer than 8? Would you loose your shit (rightly) if the dr said the the next person "sorry the person I just saw was here with .... Witch took longer than 8 min"?

The dr can not tell you why they are late. They will need to work late too. Assume it is a good reason!!!

He or she! Forgot about equality there!

Arriva are never on time ha

Last time I had the first (8:30am) appointment at our surgery, the doctor didn't actually arrive in the surgery until 8:40. According to the receptionist that's not unusual. Explains why when I've had a later morning appointment with him it's often half an hour late or more.
I don't mind them spending more time with some patients when necessary but at least arrive on time for the first!

This issue is at the forefront of my mind at the moment. My GPs surgery is always running late – this annoys me, but the GPs are good, so I have never made a fuss about it, even when waiting 30-45 minutes for a pre-booked appointment. I once waited 30 minutes to see the GP when my appointment was the first of the morning. Surely at that point they can’t blame patients turning up late?

Anyway – recently I had an antenatal appointment, in the afternoon. I had to drive back from work (20-25 minutes away) to get back to the GP surgery. I left work a few minutes later than I really should have, and then I got stuck behind every slow moving vehicle in the world, and had to wait ages at some traffic lights (which hadn’t been there when I travelled to work in the morning). As such when I checked in for my appointment I was around 4-5 minutes late by my watch.

The GP was, for the first time in history, running on time. When I got called in, before I could speak or apologise she said tersely “I was expecting you 10 minutes ago” (which threw me completely as by my watch it was 6 minutes past at that point). The appointment was dreadful, rushed and she was obviously pissed off with me and didn’t hide it at all. My blood pressure was really high and she got cross about that. I was obviously flustered from running late and upset by her attitude – what did she expect?

So yeah – first time I’ve ever been late for an appointment and the GP treated me like shit, after years of sitting in the waiting room, twiddling my thumbs, when they are running late.

I had another antenatal appointment earlier this week (booked a morning one this time so no chance of my being late as only the surgery is only five minutes from home) and I didn’t get called into see the GP until 45 minutes after my booked appointment (different GP this time as I refuse to go back and see the other GP who was so unpleasant).

I was, of course, perfectly polite to the GP, despite having been waiting for so long.

So tempted to complain about the other cow I saw, but I doubt it would do any good.

Crap, that turned into a massive rant, sorry.

I try to turn up just over 10 minutes early - then if the previous person is late I can have their appt!

Sometimes the GP is late for the first appt because they were doing home visits from 7am, or a consultant doing emergency work.

A few times, I've been That Patient taking up 40 minutes of a GP's time. I try to make up for it by being very efficient in other appts where I just need for example a prescription that isn't allowed to be on repeat. My record is around 60 seconds!

Purple, you are talking bollocks.

Morning ward rounds are done before scheduled clinics in most hospitals. These may throw up any number of different scenarios which just have to be dealt with at the time. I have been in hospital and seen on ward rounds by consultants at around 8am. On another occasion I had been operated on in a private hospital and on that occasion the ward round happened at 7am, before the same consultant then moved on to the NHS hospital to do his ward round there.

They aren't sitting at home having Full English Breakfast and an extra coffee in order to make you wait. They are dealing with other patients. You also cannot know whether or not they were called to A & E to deal with an incoming emergency. You are not entitled to that information about other patients.

So, he wasn't in the clinic at bang on 8.45am. Poor you!! He has probably already been working for at least a couple of hours and had several urgent cases to deal with already.

I would be willing to bet that these idiots complaining that the doctor was late seeing them do not complain whenever it is them who are taking up the extra time.

Yes, you need to arrive on time for your appointment. That appointment is a guideline though because in the event of emergencies (wont to happen in medicine by its very nature) they have to be somewhat moveable goalposts.

Why do some people find that so hard to understand?

Cock (do you mind if I call you that? )

It's exactly the same at our surgery. 8:40am is the first appt. The GP will park outside the waiting room window at 8:55am, saunter through the waiting room at 8:58am, chat to the receptionist and finally see the first patient at about 9:20am. .

Of course the list runs over anyway through the day, but starting at least 40 mins late every day can't be acceptable!

FuckSanta Are you there every morning ?

I dont think anyone minds delays caused by emergencies, they cant be helped.

What annoys me is what an earlier poster said "Some of the elderly patients like to chat". They are not there to chat, it should be the doctors job to try and gently but firmly keep them focused on their appointment. I have a feeling that doctors appointments have become a way for some people to schedule "social interaction and chatting time" because the funding for day centres etc has been cut so much.

I also agree with a previous comment that its unfair that the early appointments always seem to be full of elderly patients that dont have to get to a job, I dont see why the first hours block of appointments cant be saved for people who have to get to work or school. I know a lot of elderly people get up early and "like to get things done early", but they arent at risk of being fired if they have too many late starts or early finishes.

It seems like the GPs surgeries could cut down a lot of resentment if they had some kind of display up of how far they are running behind - if everyone knew they were running 2 hours late as is usual at mine, people could go for a walk, get some shopping in, go home, anything would be better than sitting for 2 hours in a small room full of coughing people and crying babies!

My doctors are routinely running at least 30 mins late, so I'm a bit meh about your post OP. Also when my DM (and countless others) was having chemo or seeing her consultant, she would routinely wait up to 2 hours. So I think YABU really.

storm you're not wrong at all. It sounds like a cop out, but when you know that you may be that person's only interaction for the day it can be incredibly hard to cut them short, and then if you do people are like to complain. Even the subtle signs like getting their coat and opening the door ends up with you standing in the doorway listening to a story about their grandchildren. It's hard.

My friend is a GP in the NE and says when she sees a patient of working age she knows it is serious as it is so hard for them to get time off and get to the surgery. Most of her time is taken up with young children and the retired.

For those surgeries which don't run to time would you be able to phone the surgery before setting off and ask if the doctor is running on time or if you should come later? This is what I do with my dentist as he is often running late by the afternoon. The receptionist tells me what time to arrive.

portia. No, but it's happened every time I've been there in the last 10 years. He's very well known for it. (Small place, everyone is registered there.)

Like others I completely appreciate emergency situations and that 10 minutes isn't enough but it's when you know that clinics haven't happened beforehand and when you are the GP surgery's first appointment and you're half an hour delayed - that's when it starts taking the piss.

I work as a HCP in hospital and have many friends who are hospital doctors and GPs. When i went for my ante-natal appointments at the same hospital to save time - I would usually ask for the earliest one and I know for a fact no maternity ward rounds were done by the same clinic doctors - still delayed for ages. And nobody in the clinic bothers to inform you how long the delay is, they all behave like they're doing you a favour and nobody else has anywhere else to be. Coupled this with extortionately priced and hard to find parking/appointments that take so long to get/you being told you must be on time but it's ok for the other side to be delayed an x amount of time.
With both babies, I noticed the admin staff were noting down the times patients came for their appointments, this is where there was a 2.5 hour delay to see anyone -but nobody tells you it's such a long wait. If you ask nicely they huff and say they're very busy. so appreciating they're really busy, I would idly sit and and stare into space/try and sit in a place where my phone got good reception.

In reply to the poster who said the secretary deliberately overbooks the clinic - this really irritates me - why when more often than not there will be a delay would you increase the chances of that even more and allow for patients getting even less time? That's not the posters fault btw, I just don't understand the logic.

There was once a thread here which went something along the lines of "cant say anything negative about the nhs without being hounded" and this thread is kind of evident of that.