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 Waiting Room
Medical mishaps reported each week by our covert correspondent, Jackie Marshall, who works at the coalface of modern medicine - the waiting room at a National Health Service (NHS) clinic. (Why not catch up on Jackie's most recent trials and tribulations.)
Surgery Etiquette 101
November 20, 2006
Occupational Hazards 101: Trainee airline cabin crew are frequently in a haze of snot and fever. Forget jet-lag; a significant number of them drop-out after their six months of training because they can't take the bugs. With low levels of cabin-air turnover and the constant flow of travelers from all corners of the globe, a newly-qualified trolley dolly is in a roughly equivalent immunological position to a three-year-old who's just started nursery school. Over the course of that half-year of training, they will spend a large part of their income on decongestants, anti-inflammatories and caffeine (and of course, large quantities of duty-free alcohol) just to keep going. And once it's over, if they can tough it out, their immune systems will be stronger than ever before and they will be able to fight-off pretty much anything.
Not surprisingly, those of us who man (or woman) the front-desks at surgeries go through a similar experience. Doctors too, of course, but doctors a) have many years of training behind them by the time they're let loose in general practice and b) have a better chance of going over their rooms with the old antiseptic wipes between patients than we do. And people don't seem to mind so much if the doctor slips on a pair of rubber gloves before they get up-close-and-personal than they do if we front-line grunts start standing back and holding our hands over our faces. It's one of the reasons that we can seem stand-offish. It's also why - after we've carried on coming in month after month feeling like we've been through the blender - we don't always seem particularly sympathetic when someone comes in demanding a sick-note for a sniffle.
Liz has only been here three months and this is her first Cold Season. We all go down with whatever this year's cold is within a couple of weeks of it first appearing, of course, and surgery staff are the first to benefit from free flu jabs, but poor old Liz has been suffering for three weeks now with sinus headaches and the sort of cough that sounds like it originated in the La Brea Tar Pits. Her eyes sometimes run so much that people think she's suffered a bereavement. And the ironic thing is, we've had a couple of complaints about the state of her and how she shouldn't be in work spreading her bugs about the place. Me, I've already had a nasty dose of near-bronchitis, and it's only November.
So, look: health workers get sick too. We're not, at least, particularly at risk of the real nasties like Hep B, HIV and antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis like our ER colleagues, but we can, and do, catch the things people bring in with them, and if everyone in the health service took time-off every time they caught an infection, the tax burden on the country would double overnight. For your own sake as well as ours, here are a few pointers about surgery etiquette:
- Wash your hands before you arrive.
- Try not to wear the pajamas you've been sweating in all night. It's not just not nice to look at; you'll be wafting great clouds of stale yuk over everyone within ten feet of you every time you reach out for an eighteen-month-old copy of Woman's Own while you wait.
- When you're telling the receptionist that you have a cough, please don't feel that it's obligatory to give a demonstration.
- If you use the bathroom it would be a good idea to wash your hands again. Preferably both before and after you've flushed.
- Every doctor's waiting room contains at least one plastic-lined flip-top wastebasket. These, and not the tables, floor or seat of the chair you've just got out of are the proper places for the disposal of the snotrag you've been dribbling in while you wait.
- Then again, just because you can't be bothered to dispose of your snotrags, letting snot run down your upper lip then scraping it off with your thumbnail into your mouth is not a reasonable alternative.
Most of all, though - and I'm certain that this is the primary cause of patient-to-patient infection in public places - if you have to fill in a form and have to borrow a pen, please, please, please think several times before you suck it while you try to remember your postcode. Seriously, it's not fair. Chances are I'm going to put it in my mouth next.
(Catch up on the most recent happenings in the waiting room.)
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