To leave instead of waiting until my appointment

[Kate8889]

Context: US healthcare

I made an appointment the other day for cold symptoms with my doctor, they said I needed to show up 45 minutes early to get swabbed to test for flu/COVID etc.

I get there and they swab me, 40 minutes until my appointment. I go to leave and come back later (my house is very close by) and the nurse stops me and says I need to stay in that particular seat until the doctor is ready to see me. 40 minutes out of my day for no reason. I asked why I needed to wait exactly and she told me this was protocol but could give no reason.

I left and came back for my appointment and everything worked out fine. Was I out of line?

The way I deal with this is to pop to the pharmacy and get a hay fever nasal spray. Sorts it right out within 24 hours.

Why would you have a long appointment? A gp gets 7 minutes

I work in IT and I find it baffling that you left work at 3.30 and still worried about getting more done so you needed to stress about working around a doctors appointment. It sounds excessive and maybe the issue is your work and not the doctors practice. Couldn’t you catch up after the appointment? Software engineering is usually not that time sensitive.

There’s really no point posting about this kind of thing on a U.K. website. The health systems and people’s attitudes are polar opposites.

In the U.K. it’s like a war zone in the NHS. The health system matters; individual patients interests are deferred to the interests of the system and staff - way way down the list. You are grateful for any medical attention and can’t expect to be seen anywhere near your appointment time as your personal position - job or whatever - just doesn’t matter. In the U.K. if you aren’t prepared or able to put absolutely everything else in your life, however important, aside for medical treatment then you’ll be regarded as not really ill or a time waster.

In the US it’s a consumer model so patient centred and you have more expectation of a more patient centred approach because you could always go elsewhere and have a legitimate expectation of decent care. That assuming you can pay of course. In the U.K. payment direct isn’t necessary but we all share democratically in the failing services - unless you are a well known politician etc or pay privately,

British pp’s showing their absolute ignorance of the US workplace.

We Brits get such good annual leave and maternity leave compared to the US.
My dniece had to be back at work when baby was 3 months old.

Also I had a sinus infection years ago, it was one of the worst pains I’ve ever had. I was at the gp’s within 2 weeks.

This is a united kingdom website. You would get better answers on an American website.

Exactly, we don't know because we are not American. Hence why the poster shouldn't have posted this on a UK website🙄

The question was a fair one regardless.
Is there anything wrong with popping out and returning at your appointment time?

I would say no.
However many (British) pp’s on here are blindly in awe of doing as they’re told.
I’m not surprised it took a Brit to write 1984.

Maybe try reading the post I was responding to? Conversations move on.

I did - it's all there in the quotes. No one else mentioned A&E so I thought it was a non sequitur. Also I wasn't being rude, so not really sure where the patronising tone comes from.

What is the point in a swab test for you to go back outside in public, your test would be void as you may have crossed paths with someone infected.

This is so far from my and my pretty ill partners experience and my elderly fathers and both my daughters in varioys parts of the country. All of us have had incredibly good and timely treatment from the nhs. Your experience is not everyones experience, from my perspective the nhs is not failing.

I’m really glad you’ve had good experiences.

Yes, we’ve also had superb treatment on occasion. And lovely professional staff - and sometimes not so. But, let’s face it - it’s the luck of the draw. For example, in much of Scotland, you better not have a stroke outside 9-5 Monday to Friday or you won’t be able to secure the timely interventions needed to minimise damage to brain and life.

Anecdata isn’t evidence. The statistics and facts are unarguable. Survival rates in the U.K. for many serious diseases are far worse than elsewhere in Europe and other supposedly sophisticated healthcare systems. The U.K. Care Quality Commission recently rated two thirds of English maternity units as failing. The U.K. is one of the few healthcare systems in the civilised world where people are not offered yearly medicals - which is probably why our late diagnoses and deaths are higher in number than elsewhere.

If you’ve lived almost anywhere else in Europe, in Australia, Canada, the US, it’s perhaps hard to understand that professional timely care with an element of patient choice is almost invariably a given. It’s not a lottery as here. And in the U.K. you are stuck if you need A&E even if able to pay for private care - there are no private A & E outside London.

You don’t become infectious with covid or flu within 40 minutes of being exposed to it.

I agree OP sinus infection for 4 weeks is not joke. I can barely manage a few days. I can't think, sleep, breathe with one sometimes. They are horrible. Hope it cures it.

If you work in the UK for a US company then UK employment law applies and you are entitled to 28 days holiday plus sick leave. The laws that apply are where the person works not where their employer is based.

Didn’t the OP say US healthcare? So I assumed she is in the US.

3 months? That's longer than most of us get. I got 6 weeks paid maternity leave.

Sorry I missed where th OP said she was in the US (just picked up that she worked for a US company) and assumed she was in the UK complaining about the GP .

Ah ok thank you. Fair enough. It's just if someone here mentions the word 'cold' to a GP service a doctor wouldn't even see you. So yeah we'd say 'sinus infection/pain'.

I still find the post peculiar as clearly what they did was fine. As nothing came of it.

‘Cold symptoms’ is what Op said

Only if I had yellow/green snot, which would indicate an infection that might need antibiotics. Otherwise, I'd get by with OTC decongestant and analgesia.

I left and came back for my appointment and everything worked out fine. Was I out of line?

Yes for 40 minutes 🙈😂

Those 3 months probably weren’t paid, the “had to be back” is more likely to be that she’d have lost her job if she’d stayed off longer.