any hospital doctors can tell me why this is?

[zoemaguire]

DD1 (8) has been given an emergency appointment at the hospital for tomorrow - bit of an overreaction hopefully but she's been having headaches and eye disturbances for the past few weeks and our GP wants to exclude anything nasty.

But I've just realised that the appointment we've been given (the hospital rang this afternoon) is at the surgical ward?! Can anybody explain why this might be? I've only ever had outpatient appointments at an outpatient clinic, and I'm at a loss as to why we're being sent to a ward, let alone a surgical one. The appointments phone line is closed and my mind is working overtime!

I'm not a paediatric doctor, but I can answer the question. Please don't worry. It will just be that the surgical ward can arrange any investigations they think are necessary. At this stage, all they know is 'child with headache and visual disturbance' - there can be lots of explanations for this.

Thank you so much lougle - that's really helpful and has put my mind at rest about that, I knew there must be some reasoning behind it but just couldn't quite compute what it was.

(Ex hospital manager) It could also be that they run an emergency outpatients clinic from the ward one or two days per week, for people who really need to be seen but the usual outpatients clinic is already full. We had cardiac wards who did this - same doctors, same investigations, but for those few people who needed assessment within a week so couldn't be added to a long outpatients waiting list.

DD2 had similar at that age. They turned out to be migraines, which she still gets. Not nice, but much better than some of the possibilities. Hope your dd is similar.

Thanks rather and witchend. I'm trying not to freak out witchend, they don't seem like migraines as they are too constant, but who knows. Most likely she is just incredibly tired, she has incredible difficulty falling asleep so is often still awake at midnight. But of course it's hard to ignore the more sinister possibilities, especially when you get a hospital referral in under a week:(