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

[Breezy_Carol]

On the other side of the story. I am a physical therapist in home care. Often a patient gets discharged from the hospital on a Thursday and I have to see the patient on Friday but if I try to call the MD to clarify orders it is rare to find any surgeon in the office after 2 on Friday.

 

[DznyLvr2005]

I work for a surgeon in New Jersey thats only opened 9-5. He refuses to get answering services, so after 5, if there is an emergency, he gets beeped. I think it even says on our machine that the line is ONLY FOR AN EMERGENCY, all other calls will have to wait until office hours.
But I live in NYC (well staten Island is a part of NYC) and most doctors offices are ALWAYS opened way after 5pm and most are opened on Saturdays.

 

[PattnFmly]

Our pediatrician is open until 5:00 pm but they stay until all the sick calls are done. And they do put the phones to service at 5:00. But they are also open 7 days/week. All day on Saturday and 'till noon on Sunday. The ER was getting too many visits on Sunday so they decided to capitalize and open for the morning only. Luckily we have very few sick calls in our family! I can leave those appts for others!

 

[Galahad]

On the other side of the story. I am a physical therapist in home care. Often a patient gets discharged from the hospital on a Thursday and I have to see the patient on Friday but if I try to call the MD to clarify orders it is rare to find any surgeon in the office after 2 on Friday.

Well yeah, but health care workers calling each other is a different matter. DW gets pages - even when she's not on call - from nurses, PA's, other docs, to clarify something. That's a lot different than getting a call from every nervous mom north of U.S. 30.

 

[Poohnatic]

On the other side of the story. I am a physical therapist in home care. Often a patient gets discharged from the hospital on a Thursday and I have to see the patient on Friday but if I try to call the MD to clarify orders it is rare to find any surgeon in the office after 2 on Friday.

I was going to say, I once called my vascular surgeon around 2pm on a Friday, a week after getting discharged from the hospital. The answering service informed me that he wasn't available-I was used to 4 or 5pm being the norm.

It was for something important, and the doctor ripped my head off when he called me back! I hung up the phone, took my provider directory and started looking for other surgeons, because I had no control over my situation. I thought I was reasonable in trying to get into the office at a normal time. Ten minutes later, he called and apologized. By way of explanation, the hospital had been calling him non stop regarding some orders they didn't understand.

The lesson I learned from that one is: on Fridays, call before lunch, just in case. For the rest of my dealings with that doctor, he turned from Dr. Gruff to Dr. Courteous. Guess my explanation of WHY I called made him realize I wasn't calling for a trivial reason.

Suzanne

 

[jodifla]

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.

I wouldn't go to a doctor that closed at 5 and didn't take calls on an answering service.

That's a lousy doctor in my book. People don't get sick on a strict schedule.

 

[Fire14]

I feel bad when I have to call answering service of a residents MD just to get ok to release body to funeral home. It seems like they always die around 3a on Saturday or Sunday.

 

[Erin1700]

Our Peds office is opened till 4:30 M-F and if you need a sick appt after that, they will see you up until 8PM but you have to take the next available appt. Also they are opened till noon on weekends.

I was thankful for that today as I had to take my DS7months in for a fever!

When I was a kid, our family doc would see kids as early as 7AM, then if he found nothing wrong with you, he would tell you to get to school!

 

[texas munchkin]

I worked for an answering service 20 or so years ago. I was there for 7 years and found for the most part to have the same experience as the OP. People not knowing when the office closes is one thing and most of those people just ask when to call back or hang up. But believe me, we also had a fair share of rude folks as well. You may or may not know that in most cases the answering service itself doesn't set the rules or what the doctor does or doesn't get called for. The individual doctors do that depending on what is acceptable to them.

I was called everything but a child of God for not calling the doctor on a Sunday morning for birth control pills. Most doctors fill them for 6 months at a time, so when they picked up the last packet, they knew then you had so many days left to get into his office, but now you want the world to stop turning because they couldn't keep their knees together for one more day. Give me a break.. very selfish. Doctors have families too.

I'm not saying everyone who calls their doctor after hours is like this nor are their problems trivial, but those people are out there.

Now I am an insurance adjuster.. People hate me there too.. LOL.

 

[WaltD4Me]

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 just had to comment on this.....

You have to remember that the answering service does not set the rules...the doctor or their office does and I would bet anything that this office has left strict instructions at the service not to call them during lunch...now when you complain, they aren't going to tell you that, but we have MANY offices that give us this instruction and I have been yelled at many times for calling during lunch for things that seemed to be a real emergency. It makes no difference to us at the answering service, if a doctor wants to be paged for every call he gets, that is what we do...I have a few doctors like that, but most, right or wrong, have very specific instructions about what we can reach them for and get very upset with us if we don't follow those instructions.

 

[allison443]

Pharmacies close at 5:00 as well.

Around here there are a number of pharmacies that are open 24 hours. I have wondered if they are busy in the middle of the night...I guess they do get calls!

 

[Camicar]

A relative of mine does the OP's job. I am entertained immensely by her emails detailing what people think are emergencies. My personal favorite was teh 11pm phone call asking about breast augmentation which the woman truly thought was an emergency requiring an immediate answer. I'm not sure why -- after all, breast augmentation is not like driving your breast up to a self service pump and filling 'er up.

 

[It's A Happy Day]

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

The problem with that these days is if you go to the ER, 1/2 the time your insurance will not pay for it because either they don't feel it was an "emergency", you should have called either your Dr or insurance co. 1st, or you should have gone to "urgent care" vs. the "ER". How the insurance companies are running things also have a play in the trivial and ridiculous things a physicians office has to do. I do medical billing and it's a head shaker sometimes.

We do not call the "on call" unless it is a problem I feel I have no other option available. In this house the general rule is if you come down with something at the beginning of the week and it has not kicked by Thursday and it *seems* like it may fester over the weekend, we call the pedi and get in before it becomes either an urgent care visit or 3AM visit. We LOVE our Ped's office - I had to call this past Sunday at 8:45AM and they are not in on weekends. DS6 had a cold since Wed. and Sat AM at 4:30 he woke up crying of an earache. After drugging him out all day Sat on motrin and his waking up in the same state Sunday AM, I called the office. My ped. called back within 5 minutes and said I'm at the office anyway, bring him in! I was very surprised to be able to get a SUNDAY visit and very happy to get the situation resolved so easily! DS had an ear infection and we were able to get the proper meds in him before the school week started. DS's last visit was Dec. 06 so we rarely have after hours calls/visits.

I have also called the ER triage nurse instead of paging an on call at 3 in the morning to ask a question regarding a high fever and meds because I thought it would be dumb to wake a MD or sit in an ER for hours when I could be doing the same thing at home. That particular instance, my DD was around 3 and I could not get her fever down for more than a couple hours with Motrin or Tylenol and wanted info on piggybacking the meds. Something I had heard but wasn't sure about and did not want to attempt without some clarification.

 

[DarthKTrava]

Also that doctors only work 4 days a week. I've rarely seen a doc's office open on a Friday. Guess the golf courses must be packed that day....

 

[KariC]

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

Have you had a migraine? At my PCP's office, calling for a migraine in their "off hours" is totally acceptable. I once had to call b/c my insurance wouldn't refill a 'script for a triptan blocker (too many that month), so I needed a new drug called in for me. I was so apologetic, and the doctor on call told me, very clearly, that a migraine and no drugs was worthy of having a doctor paged. Love that practice. (FTR, I had a tumor in my head that was not discovered yet...I was going thru so many triptans in a month that there was no way for me to stay on top of what the insurance company would allow).

However, we've had some doozies with our ped's office. In fact, I just complained about their answering service 2 weeks ago. My DD had fallen and whacked her head, hard, at an ice cream parlor. Her eyes weren't reactive, and her head swelled so quickly I thought her skin would split. 911 was called by a few people, and the ambulance(s) came. The EMTs told us to call the ped (8 pm on Wednesday), get their advice, and then transport her ourselves to our Childrens' if the doc thought we needed to. We waited for 45 minutes, no call, so my DH had to call back. That time we waited 10 minutes (more reasonable), and teh doc said he'd never got the first message. Thankfully, she was okay...but, still.....with head injuries you'd like to be called back in a timely fashion.

 

[tonilea]

I feel for you. I work for a vet, so it is different stories - but it must be the same people... We close at noon on Saturdays. A man calls at 11:30, says he must see the vet today. After further questioning, his dog has been sick for weeks, but he thinks "he might die today". We did see the dog, the man did pay an after hours fee and sadly there was no help for his dog.

 

[aprilgail2]

Pharmacies close at 5:00 as well.

:

Well I would have to pick a different pharmacy then! Around here many are open 24 hours and all are open until at least 9pm every night.
I also would switch Dr's if they clsoed at 5pm, that is nuts! How exactly would people that work 8-5 ecer get to see a Dr without having to take a day off from work????

 

[Mermaid02]

I work in a pediatricians office. Our appointment hours vary- but we do turn the phones over to the service at 4:30- they fax the calls into us until we leave the office (this time of year 7-8) and then after that they page the doc on call. We also have Sat/Sun acute hours. It amazes me what people will call for on a weekend. Last time I worked a Saturday- someone called to see if she could bring her son in for a sports physical so he could play soccer. Ummm NO. Those visits are for sick kids- not Mom's who didn't plan ahead.

 

[aprilgail2]

. Last time I worked a Saturday- someone called to see if she could bring her son in for a sports physical so he could play soccer. Ummm NO. Those visits are for sick kids- not Mom's who didn't plan ahead.

You don't do well visits on the weekends its just set aside for sickness? My daughters yearly camp physical is always on a Sat as that is my day off and the day that is easiest for me to get her there. I make my weekend appointment months in advance so I can be sure to get a physical appt on a Saturday.

 

[Mermaid02]

You don't do well visits on the weekends its just set aside for sickness? My daughters yearly camp physical is always on a Sat as that is my day off and the day that is easiest for me to get her there. I make my weekend appointment months in advance so I can be sure to get a physical appt on a Saturday.

Weekends are acute visits only- we do have some evening appts available during the week though.