Case study: A patient’s experience in A&E
It started with a chesty cough
“I had a telephone consultation with my doctor after suffering with a chesty cough for many days.
My doctor advised for me to go to A&E to be tested for Pulmonary Embolism (PE) because for some of those days I had coughed up blood.
Around 45 minutes later, I had arrived at A&E."
What is Pulmonary Embolism (PE)?
Pulmonary Embolism (PE) is when a blood vessel in your lungs is blocked by a blood clot. If it is not treated quickly, it can be life-threatening.
It can cause you to have chest pain, to be coughing up blood and to have difficulty breathing. You can test for PE through blood tests, x-rays, MRIs, ultrasounds, and various other scans.
The inefficiencies
"I found there to be a number of inefficiencies at the hospital throughout my time there. They didn’t have access to my telephone consultation from earlier that day and couldn’t find what antibiotics I had been prescribed.
Why can’t they look up all my medication, instead of relying on patients to remember their medication?
The triage nurse didn’t request for the blood test that my doctor had initially asked for to test for PE so I never had it done. When I asked about it I was told that it wasn’t done because a doctor needed to authorise it."
I couldn’t stay any longer…
I left in the early hours of the next morning after being there for 9 hours. I wasn’t given any results or update about the PE. All I knew is that I didn’t have the blood tests that my doctor requested.
I had left having had a chest x-ray and an appointment for later in the morning to Ambulatory Emergency Care (AEC). I found out that I had been cleared off the system at A&E even though I was still waiting to be seen. I watched staff being verbally abused and a woman lying on the floor in agony and being ignored for hours, it was awful. I needed to go home to get some sleep.
After a few hours sleep, I had gone back for my AEC appointment. On arrival to AEC, I was told that the laboratory hadn’t received the requests from A&E, so again I had to sit and wait. It was over 4 hours before I saw the doctor who told me that the tests for PE had come back negative and that it was a chest infection.
It would have been better if I had been able to skip A&E as it was 9 hours with no resolve."
The waiting just made me feel more unwell.
