Friday, January 16, 2009

Day +926 : An unsuccessful walk-in

I am fine today.

I went to UH as early as 6:30am to see skin specialist. Not many people were there when I reached there and the queue machine was not even operational yet.

A nurse came at 7:30am to start the queue machine and I got queue number 8. The skin clinic is one of the clinics operate at certain time of the week within the General Clinic 1. Apart from the skin clinic, there were other clinics such as asthma going on in the General Clinic 1. Every clinic is assigned a few rooms for doctors to see patients.

Everyone who comes to the General Clinic, no matter which specialist clinic he/she will go, needs to get a general queue number. He/she will then wait for his/her turn to register at the payment counter to see specific specialist in the relevant clinic. After the payment, the counter staff will issue another queue number which is specific to the particular specialist clinic.

When it was my turn to register, the counter staff told me that she needed to ask the doctor if he wanted to see me. It is because I didn’t make an appointment and was considered a walk-in patient.

After getting the referral letter from my haematologist last Monday, I went to make appointment to see skin specialist. The staff there advised me to walk in on Tuesday or Friday. The reason that she gave was that the earliest appointment she could arrange for me was May. So a better way is to walk in to see if the doctor would like to meet me.

I was notified at 10:00am that the skin specialist couldn’t see me today. However, he would like to see me next Friday and with the doctor’s note, I made an appointment successfully.

I am wondering why the staff who was in charge of the appointment that day told me that the earliest appointment that I could have was on May, but I was able to make it next Friday this morning.

With this, I have to go to hospital twice next week; seeing the eye specialist on Monday and skin specialist on Friday, and then immediately after the Chinese New Year, back to see the haematologist again :-)

See you next post :-)

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