Serious question. I wonder if anyone in the medical field can enlighten me.
Backstory: I am scheduled to have a GID, esophageal biopsy, and whatever.
I am scheduled for two weeks out.
The kind lady at the surgeons office said they have to schedule not only the surgeon, but the anesthesiologist, the attending nurses, a room for me, yada yada.
Don’t get me wrong, I live in a small town that has a hospital and they have been exemplary when I had to visit ER and being admitted thereafter. (More times than I care to admit. They know me by my first name there. :p).
I have had this procedure before, and after stabilized in ER. Admitted, boom…off to OR.
Do they have to import/recruit support personnel, or are they just booked up being the holiday season?
Just curious about the behind the scenes action going on.
Extraordinary measures are available in an emergency: you can skip the waiting line (of non-emergency patients), people work harder, faster, and longer to get things done, some people may even get called in on their days off. Non-emergency patients may have to wait longer or have their appointments rescheduled for another day. It is a lot more expensive and exhausting to do things that way.
If you got speedier treatment in a non-emergency situation (which sounds like the case on rereading your post) you probably just got lucky and they already had all the necessary people on hand (perhaps because another patient had to cancel/reschedule a planned operation). They may be booked up for the holiday season, not (necessarily) because more people get sick during the holidays, but because doctors, nurses, etc. want to take time off right now, too. Most can’t, but losing just a few key people can really reduce your capacity.
Rushed or unscheduled operations greatly increase the likelihood of mistakes, and the medical profession HATES risk (for good reason). Also, if you’ve been in the hospital a lot, they’re probably being extra cautious with your treatment (e.g. using their most experienced staff, maybe an extra person or two, and their best-equipped operating room).
disclaimer: I don’t work in medicine or anything related, this is based on experience, stories from relatives in medicine (several nurses in my family), and the occasional documentary/trivia show.
Most hospitals with operating rooms (really, a suite of rooms in which operations can take place) will have two distinct periods during the week: elective surgery, usually 8 - 5 M-F, and emergency surgery (all other times). During the emergency surgery hours, a limited number of staff are resident in the OR, and other staff as needed (mostly the doctors/anethesiologists) are on call. So if someone comes in to the ER with, for example, the need for an appendectomy, a room is prepped for the surgery, the internal medicine surgeon on call is notified, as is the anesthesiologist on call, the nurses who are on schedule prep up, back-up nurses on call are called in (so that, if another case shows up, staff is ready), etc.
During the elective surgery hours, everything is carefully scheduled in advance, including all needed personnel. There will be limits on how many of each type of procedure can happen in a given day (based upon number of rooms available, length of procedure, staff available, etc.). Since the procedures are elective, rather than emergent, they can be scheduled fairly far out.
Of course, sometimes this creates a bit of a pain when you want to schedule someone electively, but there is a factor of some speed needed. In the OR I worked in back in the early '80s, it was an open secret that the orhopods would claim various surgeries were emergent, when in fact they were simply jumping the elective surgery into the emergency slot. :rolleyes:
It’s not clear who exactly “they” is, who have to do the scheduling.
Around here, the surgeons office would have to schedule the surgeion, the anesthesiologist, any assisting MD, and the hospital. The hospital would schedule the nurses, the recovery room etc.
Does your surgeon have to schedule the surgical nursing team, the surgery theatre*, and the recovery bed seperately for elective surgery? If so, that would obviously be more work than simply turning up for an emergency.
*PS: I’m always interested in architecture. I loved seeing those old surgical theatres with the banked seating for the medical students and the glass roof lights for natural lighting.
“They” is my surgeons’ office who has done procedures on me before. But he is now retired from practice.
I realize when I last went to ER with the same problem as now, it was an unknown condition and they performed testing on me up the yahzoo. (CT scan, X-rays, MRI, that nasty stuff you drink and roll over once which causes explosive diarrhea a few hours later). I appreciate their care, and it literately saved my life
I am dreading to do this again, as hospital beds are uncomfortable and they wake you up every 20 minutes for vitals and to see if you are still alive or stone cold dead.
However, I am drifting out of GQ territory. I now realize I am in the “Elective” camp and will hopefully make it until my appointment. I will probably ask my new surgeon how it all works - it would be neat to see this process in action before that IV knocks me out.
For the knee, they started out by just giving me a spinal injection. But when I raised my head to watch the process in action :), the anaesthetist gave me gas, and that’s all I remember.
I had bypass surgery, and the anesthesiologist pumped some sleepy-time medicine into my IV just before I was pushed into the OR. I kept my head up as long as I could to look around, but it wasn’t very long. I do remember that the OR was freezing!
Maybe you should take a sweater with you!
Good luck with the procedure; hope it goes smoothly and that you’re up and around quickly.
