Today has been reasonably quiet and easy. But things will be very different tommorow as I'll be on-call for the weekend, starting from tommorrow. This means I'll be the clerking machine, seeing the vast majority of the new acute medical patients. I'll be working non-stop (most probably) from 0830 till 2130. I would not have time to rest or to eat. In fact base don my previous experience, taking a 2 min toilet break would be equally impossible.
Friday is always a mayhem in the hospital, with GPs referring every single patient they see to us, and then go on a weekend break. We,on the other hand, will have to sort out their mess from the community. If the GPs detect any hint that the patients might give them problems over the w/end, he or she will have absolutely no hesitation to chuck them to us. They hate to have their w/end interrupted by patients. They don't want to be called out to see patients at home. Weekdays fine, weekend NO!!
So we will most likely end up having 30-40 patients being sent to us in a 12 hours shift. That's an awful lot for a district general hospital. Worse still, there will only be 3 doctors on-call tommorrow. Even worse still, is that because I'm the SHO, I will be seeing 60% of them. The JHO, being a newly qualified doc, is understandably slower then me; the Registrar, being more senior than me, will only troubleshoot here and there. It would be lucky if he can help me to clerk a few patients.
Nonetheless I think the experience would be most rewarding and gratifying. Only if I don't end up arguing with the Management (again!!) tommorrow regarding the A&E 4 hour waiting time target.
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