FYI: Most Doctor's Offices Close at 5pm!

[WaltD4Me]

Sorry I feel the need to vent........

I work for an answering service. Most of our accounts are doctors and medical offices. Most of our accounts use us after hours so we can reach the doctor in case of an emergency.

Now what is considered an emergency to alot of people anymore is whole other thread, but aside from that, it is amazing how many people call after 5pm to make appointments, request medical records,
ask for routine prescription refills, ask for excuse notes for their job, or ask for test results...like the doctor carries them around with him, ect...

Now, I know that not all offices close at 5pm, but I would say 75% of them do and some even earlier...we have a few that are in late, one doctor has office hours 10am til 8pm! But for the most part, it's 5pm. It isn't a new concept.

And it isn't even that they call at 6, 7, 8, 9pm...it's that they are shocked that the office isn't open.
Like it never occured to them they wouldn't be able to get a work excuse faxed to them at 8 o'clock at night.

I know people are busy and most work their own 9am-5pm jobs (or longer) but really, anymore people think doctors should be available to them practically 24 hours a day for everything not just medical problems that happen after an office closes.

Ok, that was my weird little vent. Just felt like sharing.

 

[Minniemouse07]

The family practitioners that dh and I go to are open until 10pm, four days a week!

 

[Christine]

Yep, I agree with you. I think it's odd. Probably just part of today's society used to have access to most things all the time--you know 24 hour banking now, stuff like that. They probably think doctor's and their staff are working all the time.

 

[momof3disneyholics]

I used to work for an answering service for many years so I feel your pain. People just wouldn't believe me that I didn't work for their office and that I could not schedule them an appt.
Oh, and don't you love the people that just "have" to talk to their doctor right now and their doctor is not on call? They just could not understand that we could only page the doctor on call no matter whether or not their doctor told them to call them anytime.

 

[General Xho]

Maybe these people call with the intention of leaving a voice mail to be returned during business hours. I know that if I think of a task that needs to be accomplished, if I don't do it right then, I'll forget about it for a week.

 

[tiggersmom2]

My pediatrician's office (there is about 20 doctors in practice together) is open 7 days a week until 11 pm every night!

 

[Cyndibear]

Try working in a Doctor's office! The demands today of our patients are amazing.

 

[java]

Often you can't get through during the day. So after hours to leave a number for a call back doesn't seem out of line. Isn't that why they have an answering service? To answer the phone?
Oh and our office changes what days they stay open late often- so you are never sure if they are open or not. And the late nights are until 10. Understanding that not everyone has the luxury of taking a day off to head to a doctors appointment.

And honestly the demands of the office are tough too. They will only fill in a form for school or sports during a scheduled appointment. Other times they will do it for a $20 fee. And it takes 10 days to get.

 

[Mr.Monk]

Try working in a Doctor's office! The demands today of our patients are amazing.

Yes indeed! That could be an entire new thread. (And most likely it wouldn't be pretty!)

 

[carole88]

I feel for you too. My DH is a pediatrician and I run the office. It truly is amazing what people will call after hours for! My dh used to give his cell phone number out for real emergencies. Unfortunately he had to change his number because too many people abused the use of the cell phone. Now he tells his patients that he can't give out the number or I will divorce him!

 

[manning]

Try working in a Doctor's office! The demands today of our patients are amazing.

Any old timers out there who can remember what the demands where 50 years ago??

 

[clori]

the practice dh and I go to is open until at least 7pm 5 nights a week and Saturdays and Sundays 9-1. The kids pediatricians is open to noon on both weekend days and until 8pm 4 nights a week. I guess I wouldn't assume they closed at 5pm but once I realized I had an answering service I would just ask what time they opened the next day.

 

[tink_n_pooh]

I don't know of very many (I can only think of 1) doctors offices around here that aren't open until at least 7pm or 8pm on most if not all weeknights. Most offices are also open on saturdays and many on sundays too.

 

[Galahad]

I feel for you too. My DH is a pediatrician and I run the office. It truly is amazing what people will call after hours for! My dh used to give his cell phone number out for real emergencies. Unfortunately he had to change his number because too many people abused the use of the cell phone. Now he tells his patients that he can't give out the number or I will divorce him!

And if you get a "newbee" at the answering service, they will call the doctor for really silly thing. A patient will call on the weekend to "make an appointment". Instead of just telling the patient to call back on Monday, they called DW at midnight on a Saturday to say that "Mrs. Smith wants to make an appointment".

DW keeps two cell phones and has the outgoing number blocked from view. She only returns pages using one particular cell phone and never her "personal" cell phone. Having a few hundred women walking around with an OB's personal cell phone number is the worst sort of bad dream!

 

[ZPT1022]

I've called at night to leave a message when I've realized I wouldn't be able to make a scheduled appointment the next day, or to confirm what time the office is opening the next day. I try not to have to do that but sometimes things happen.

I do think that being polite can work both ways too. The answering service at our pediatrician's office can be very tough to deal with. I called once because DD aged 2 had randomly broken out into head to toe hives. She was having a reaction and I wanted to talk to the DR. Nope. sorry, they're at lunch and we WILL NOT page them I get that you cannot page them for every little thing, but an allergic reaction should warrant paging them. I ended up just driving her to the Children's Hospital ER even though the DR's office was much closer to us, and she was indeed having an allergic reaction, caused by a virus. I had a chat with the DR's office about the appropriateness of that incident and they agreed with me that it NEVER should have happened like that.

 

[delilah]

Speaking as a doctor who has been on call, I could curl your hair telling about some of the more inappropriate calls I have had. Simply being called because somebody wanted a refill or needed an appointment or test result is relatively tame. I don't schedule appointments, but, my home computer is connected to the hospital computer, and I can see almost anything from here.

I have a theory about patients who will call the first hour or so after the office closes, or after 10 pm, or during morning rush time from the time I wake up to the time I arrive in the office. I won't share it, because some people might think it unkind. I only note that since I need to get my son up and ready for school in the morning, feed him breakfast, and take him to school, I am not going to see anybody any earlier than I would if you simply wait until the receptionist arrives at 8 to unlock the door. My observation, however, is that since it became our official office policy not to call in prescriptions for controlled substance on weekends or after hours, call volume has gone down dramatically. In my state, certain prescriptions need to be written on special prescription pads, not called in, and no refills are allowed. One icy evening, when my husband was out of town, I was on call, alone with my son who was about 4 at the time. The weather was bad--there was a snow emergency where only emergency vehicles were allowed on the road. This one woman thought that I was going to drive in hazardous weather with my preschooler to deliver a prescription for methadone to her door, because she couldn't drive in that weather. Well, first of all, I don't keep those prescriptions on my person or in my house. They are locked up in the office safe. She had the unmitigated gall to complain to the medical executive committee, which summarily dismissed her complaint.

One woman paged me at 5:15 pm because she wanted me to contact the court in another county where she was to have a parole hearing the next day. I don't remember the reason why she didn't want to go. Anyway, it didn't occur to her that I wouldn't know the court's phone number, or that the courthouse would be closed after 5pm, also. She was told to call her regular doctor during normal business hours the next day.

Another woman wanted me to contact social security at 7pm because she wanted to have her funds paid directly to her, and not to her guardian. She called me repeatedly, even though I wasn't her regular doctor, and social security office was closed, too.

Most recently, a man felt compelled to tell me in vulgar and obscene language what he thought about our office policy not to call in controlled substances after hours. Needless to say, he is an ex-patient of one of my colleagues.

Some calls are funny, some are ridiculous. Too many are rude, and it can be hard to get up a 5 am to start a new day when called several times during the night. But, it's part of the job.

 

[Shugardrawers]

Until I started working at an answering service waaaay back in the stone age, it never occured to me to call my doctor after hours. If I was that sick I went to the ER. If I wasn't sick enough for the ER then it could wait until the next day. Imagine my suprise at the number of people who called at 6pm on a Friday night with a migraine they'd had for 3 days or 2am on Sunday morning because they hadn't pooped since Thursday

My all time favorite was the man who call his ped around 11pm one night. The ped had been in surgery for hours and was badly backed up with calls but most folks were very understanding. Not this guy. He was trotting to the hospital with his little guy and expected the doc to interrupt surgery and meet him in the ER to take a look at the baby. The baby's problem? Diaper rash

 

[LindsayDunn228]

I used to work 3rd shift for a Crisis Response Team. The team was in conjunction with an outpatient mental health facility upstairs. I would get calls every Friday night around 3 a.m. that would go like this:

Me: Crisis Services, this is Lindsay.
Client: I am out of my Seroquel.
Me: Who's your doctor?
Client: Dr. Whoever at Somewhere Mental Health (not our agency)
Me: When did you run out?
Client: Wednesday morning.
Me: Why haven't you called your doctor since then during the day when he could do something about it?

*crickets*

Drove me crazy.

 

[disneymom3]

DW keeps two cell phones and has the outgoing number blocked from view. She only returns pages using one particular cell phone and never her "personal" cell phone. Having a few hundred women walking around with an OB's personal cell phone number is the worst sort of bad dream!

And with many of them being pregnant women, I can only imagine!!

 

[CJMickeyMouse]

Pharmacies close at 5:00 as well.

Imagine how much we enjoyed being called at 2:00 AM for the local nursing home. An emergency, you ask???? No it was for (drumroll please).......























Test strips! That had run out that morning! Boxes of 100!!!!!!!!!!!!