{"id":154,"date":"2006-09-12T20:40:02","date_gmt":"2006-09-13T01:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/wordpress\/?p=154"},"modified":"2006-09-12T20:40:02","modified_gmt":"2006-09-13T01:40:02","slug":"hospital-appointments-they-do-overbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2006\/09\/12\/hospital-appointments-they-do-overbook\/","title":{"rendered":"Hospital appointments: they do overbook"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nRemember <a href=\"\/helen\/blog\/2006\/05\/30\/st_barts\/\">my complaints about delays at St Bart&rsquo;s<\/a>, and wondering how they could be so badly behind schedule already early in the day?\n<\/p>\n<p>\nYesterday I went to St Bart&rsquo;s again, and was seen about 40 minutes after the appointed time. But that&rsquo;s not the interesting part of the visit.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe interesting part was seeing, by chance, a summary of the doctor&rsquo;s appointments calendar for the next 8 or 10 days on which he was seeing patients. I think he is only there once a week, so this would represent the next 2 months of appointments, although the scale doesn&rsquo;t really matter here.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nOut of those 8 or 10 occasions, 1 was blocked out, 2 were marked OB 1 for &ldquo;1 overbooked&rdquo;, 1 was marked OB 2, and the rest marked simply FULL.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nIf that is at all representative, at least 30% of his days are overbooked weeks in advance. It probably only gets worse closer to the time. No wonder he&rsquo;s behind schedule every time I see him!\n<\/p>\n<p>\nWhile I was there, the receptionist came in to ask what to do about booking a follow-up for another patient. There was obviously no space in the calendar, yet the patient needed an appointment. (That&rsquo;s why the calendar printout was brought up.) So the doctor unblocked that single blocked day which he&rsquo;d apparently kept as a reserve.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nTime management the NHS way: time is a flexible, relative thing, to be stretched until it covers everything that&rsquo;s needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember my complaints about delays at St Bart&rsquo;s, and wondering how they could be so badly behind schedule already early in the day? Yesterday I went to St Bart&rsquo;s again, and was seen about 40 minutes after the appointed time. But that&rsquo;s not the interesting part of the visit. The interesting part was seeing, by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything_else"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}