Say the weird thing

Don't know, just bad luck like you said

@JPWhoo The middle of Christmas week. Medics overstretched because many of them are on holiday, many people have overindulged in alcohol causing more trouble for emergency services, etc.

Perhaps.

@ninalanyon Also, weekends are a period when it is advisable to avoid getting admitted to a general hospital.

@SunshineGirl I wonder if that is true everywhere. I think differences in how things are done might have some effect. For instance, here in Norway anyone who is spending a long time in hospital but who can manage at home for the weekend, perhaps with a supply of medicines, is sent home on Friday and told to come back on Monday. The hospital will pay for taxis to do this.

This means that the staffing level can be substantially reduced at the weekends because there is much less for them to do on the wards and plenty of beds available at least temporarily for any emergency admissions.

This is all from first hand observation when my wife was being treated for cancer; even when it was pretty bad she really didn't need 24 hour expert nursing absolutely every day, so I would pick her up on Friday and take her back either on the Monday or perhaps even later depending on exactly how things were going.

I don't have any evidence that this makes a difference, just musing on the possibilities.

@ninalanyon That sounds a really good idea that must relieve pressure when staffing levels are down.

In my wife's hospital there are serious issues in discharging patients efficiently, largely owing to shortages of nurses and pharmacists who are required to perform due diligence and sign off. I don't know if that is typical of the country as a whole.

On the plus side, my wife says that Sundays in hospital are often the calmest and most productive days, when certain overbearing doctors are absent. The remaining nurses are able to carry out their duties more efficiently, often with the assistance of young and enthusiastic nursing students and healthcare assistants.

@SunshineGirl
Well, such patients aren't discharged I suppose. They are just having the weekend off so to speak.

But efficiency is something that the UK doesn't seem to do well these days. One of the most striking things about living in Norway is that many things just seem simpler than they are in many other countries. Hierarchies are generally short and people you speak to often have enough authority to get things done.

Of course nowhere is perfect, many years ago our eldest son was in hospital he got the best treatment and clearest explanations about what was happening to him from a very young nursing assistent while the highly qualified staff just didn't seem interested despite being on a children's ward.

Mind you he was later transferred to the Rikshospital in Oslo where everyone from the most senior paediatrician to the lowliest assistant was incredibly good at communicating with children. It was very interesting to see the Norwegian way of treating children as human beings when the senior paediatric surgeon spoke to my son (aged about ten at the time) to explain what he was going to do and, without being rude, left me to just listen in. He did check at the end that i had understood what was going on of course.

@ninalanyon I take it back! I applied for London ULEZ exemption for my car (foreign registered) this morning and the email confirming that my car is exempt arrived only two hours later.

I also applied for the same exemption for Ghent and Antwerp and while they confirmed by email that I had applied within seconds they still haven't confirmed the exemption three hours later.

So British efficiency wins against Belgian! Or is just London beats Ghent and Antwerp?

@ninalanyon My wife is sister nurse on a paediatric ward, which makes her the effective manager. All patient transfers have to be signed off by her. But she is also expected to do hands on nursing as well as the department is regularly understaffed. If you are dressing a wound or comforting a distressed child you cannot suddenly break off to do desk duties, so a bottleneck develops. Delegating authority to those capable of wielding it is the obvious solution. We use practitioner nurses in local clinics to relieve pressure on GPs. Hospitals are starting to use associate physicians (educated to MSc level) to do routine ward duties.

There is no way of teaching good bedside manner, unfortunately. You'd assume that anyone working in paediatrics was motivated by compassion for children, but the reality is often more complicated.