This post was inspired by the Diabetes Dominator - Danielle Hargenrader and her video series This is how I do Diabetes. Thank you so much, Danielle. My recent visit to my diabetes clinic took five hours door to door. This is probably not unusual for many people attending outpatient clinics in public hospitals in Ireland. However, for someone who has good management of their diabetes and is a very low maintenence patient; it seems a bit ... uumm, Not Sensible.
Here's how my visit went;
I left my house at 1pm and an hour later I pulled into the queue, yes queue, for the car park at the hospital. I queued for fifteen minutes before I squeezed my Mazda into a parking spot. I had 15 minutes before my scheduled appointment and after sitting for an hour with more sitting in my future I walked over to the main hospital building used the bathroom and got a coffee. Input to replace output ;-)
I headed back over to the diabetes clinic building and I was called by the healthcare assistant for blood pressure and weight in within minutes. Then back to waiting room where I noticed a sign “Be quiet, clinic in progress”. Eemm ok! What parties have I been missing?
I’m really glad the my clinic has free WiFi - definitely helps pass the time. Most of the time I like to be disconnected from the internet when I leave the house but not for huge chunks of time in a waiting room.
A loooong time later, I took an open slot with the dietitian. What else was I doing? I was going to ask to see one anyway to get advice on areas that could help reduce my cholesterol. So this was a long educatio session, maybe 20 minutes.
AND, back to the waiting room. At this point, I was making small talk with some of the other patients there. It was an insulin pump clinic so we all had that in common. We chatted about different blood glucose meters, some of the apps that come with them, the Freestyle Libre and other CGM’s.
Another long wait later, I was called by the non consultant doctor for review. This really didn’t go anywhere. or add any value to my visit. It took me a couple of tries to log into my online records. And while I took over her keyboard, she took a call. Once I had pulled up my reports, she pointed out how my blood glucose range was very wide. Somethink I alread knew and we actually quite recent. She then asked me a couple of generic questions, you know, how many hypos do you have on average, per week, and such.
About 10 minutes later my non consultant doctor asked for the Consultant to review my case. I’m not really sure why. And then we waited for that to happen.
Once my consultant came into the room the appointment progressed much quicker and was more beneficial to me. I got to discuss all the things I needed to, got all the answers I needed and a prescription for last weeks statin too.
I used bathroom once more, checked my blood glucose and drove out of the car park at 5pm, arriving home to my door at 6:05pm
In total that's two hours in the clinic, one hour drive each way and time for parking, coffee and loo break. Time actually spent with a healthcare professionals was approx. 45 minutes.
That’s really my whole day gone. And I had organise to have my children collected from school as it was an afternoon appointment.
5 hours to be healthy!