Off Late

One of the advantages of working in an Urgent care centre, rather than on the road (only one, there are many other advantages), is that you should be able to get off on time. Unlike the ambulance service, you choose when to see patients (although you do try to see them as quickly as possible), so if you have only three minutes to go until the end of your shift you just don't call in a patient - instead you tidy the room, fill out a bit of paperwork, or make sure that your hands are spotlessly clean for going home.

Of course, while this is true, sometimes the real world has something to say on this and things go a bit wrong.

For example - if I have twenty minutes to go, I can call in that abdominal pain patient knowing that I should be able to finish assessing, treating and writing up the notes. Where it goes wrong is when the patient gets fifteen minutes into the consultation before springing a horrible surprise on me - such as the real reason why they are in my room is because they took an overdose of tablet 'x', they just haven't told anyone else. Anyone like the triage nurse who would have then sent them to the much more appropriate ED...

In that case you have to do a lot more assessing, a lot more writing up and then refer to the medical doctors - the medics, in my experience, are much quicker at answering their bleep than the orthopaedic doctors - of course the ortho's may well have someone's legs up behind their ears while they replace a hip, so they may be a bit busy.

Either way, you then have to fanny around printing out notes and front sheets and so on and so forth because, while the UCC is paper-free, the rest of the hospital isn't.

And that is why I'm typing this after leaving work over half an hour late.

So, y'know, ignore the spelling and grammar eh? This is a first draft typed before I collapse into bed.

I think I need to practice my time management skills.

(My patient didn't overdose, but they had something even more tricky wrong with them and they still needed referring to the medics. I've changed the actual circumstance to respect confidentiality).

Urgent Care Centre