smartenough

I make appts for a dr office and there are several nurses that have thick accents that call. I have transcription experience with foreign drs (indian and romainian) so I think I have a pretty fair ability to comprehend what people are saying. My main problem with these nurses is not the accent alone but that they do not identify themselves and then they speak very quickly. When I ask them to repeat something they are the ones that tend to become rude. I know that this may not be a problem that everyone has, but it makes my job quite difficult. It is difficult enough to deal with hospital calls (nurses are always in a hurry and can be a bit short) but to add to that a thick accent and speaking very quickly it is a recipe for disaster. I do take extra time with these calls because I want to get the appt correct, even if this does frustrate the person on the line.

It is a very sad situation, it seems as though there is this deep crack between the different types of care available and your daughter is suck in the middle. I think that our healthcare system needs to have more defined roles for each type of facility. Ideally everything for your daughter should be taken care of at a pcp's office, but d/t the limited availability of service hours and the overload of patients she has not been able to get in and her condition has progressed to an urgent care situation. So at this point the urgent care facility dropped the ball, they should have treated as best they could and then refered and made appts for the pt to have f/u care with a pcp they have an established relationship with. We have an interesting set up here in TN, there are pcp's that have urgent care clinics attached to their office, so not only are they avail for urgent care of established patients but they have the opportunity to take walk-in clinic pts and turn them in to regular pts. This is a great system and everybody wins, the pcp can up their revenue and by visiting the clinic you can establish your self with a pcp. You may check with clinics in your daughters area to see if there are any like this, this way she can be treated for all of her problems and have responisble f/u care. Hopefully she will find care before this becomes a problem that qualifies as an emergency.

I hear you! I am trying to get into nursing school but I currently work in an OB/GYN office and have worked in dr's offices for the last 10yrs. I completely understand what you are saying. It is very frustrating to have to work with nurses that do not want to be here. They won't take phone calls, they won't get things done, they give the office staff a hard time when you are trying to help patients with a problem or scheduling issue. I am very aware of how stressful the job can be but there are some nurses that I just want to tell them to get a different job. I have had pt's with problems and been asking a nurse for help and basically they just ask me the question back, if I had the answer I wouldn't ask you!!! There are also some things that I am not qualified to tell a pt even though I have been doing this long enough to know the answers. I don't think that anyone would want a receptionist to give a pt their test results or advise them on meds.

I think that spelling definitely counts! Not only does it look terrible to fax records to another office with several typo's but it can effect the pt's level of care. Something as simple as a few misplaced letters can change the meaning of a scentence. I work in OB/GYN and we have a procedure called a colposcopy, pt's always call it a colonoscopy. If a nurse made this mistake it could really effect a pt's care if she had another abn pap with a different practice. Correct documentation is paramount, there are just too many similar words in the medical world, even simple things can cause confusion. I'm just glad we have digital medical records because nothing is worse than a handwritten spelling error that you really can't make sense of. I do wish our records system had spell check!!!

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