"Wait time in ED"

I was waiting in the Emergency Department (ED) for around seven hours in pain with mastitis and a very young baby.

I presented to ED as I couldn’t get an appointment with any GP’s in town and a week beforehand my GP had said if my condition hadn’t gone away to go to ED. I contemplated if I should use ED as a resource as I know how busy it can get but I was worried my mastitis was developing into an abscess. I arrived early and I was seen by a doctor mid-morning.

I understand there can be a long wait to be seen so I accept this wait time. The doctor and student doctor who saw me were great and I have no complaints about them. I then had to wait for an ultrasound so was sent back out into the waiting room. After another wait I asked the triage nurse (who was lovely) if I could leave to go home and if they could call me if there was a free spot for an ultrasound as I was feeling so sick and trying to deal with a newborn in the waiting room. They agreed but as I was leaving there was a time slot to ultrasound me.

After the ultrasound I was sent back to ED and saw a new triage nurse. They told me I would have to wait in the waiting room until a doctor was free to see me with my results. I asked if I could go home and if the doctor could call me with the results in which they told me no, I had to wait. I waited another long period in the waiting room with my newborn and still had no idea what was happening. I went back up to this triage nurse and asked for some Panadol. I then asked if they happened to know how much longer I would be waiting and they replied this is emergency, rather rudely in my opinion. I told them I understood that but I was wanting to go home as I had been waiting a long time, I was in pain and so exhausted I needed to sleep and they just shrugged their shoulders and said it’s the Emergency Department for emergencies.

I was so upset with this response that I started to cry, I couldn’t believe someone with a duty of care would talk to me so rudely. There was no compassion, especially for a mum with a newborn baby in a stressful environment with mastitis. 

Luckily another staff member from the hospital walked past and saw how upset I was and asked me what was going on. I’m so thankful that this staff member showed me empathy and looked into my situation, and asked another nurse to help me out. Five minutes after this staff member assisted me I was lead to a bed and offered me a sandwich, a drink and to take my baby for a walk so I could have five minutes to myself. When the nurse returned from the walk they told me that I could go home and the doctor would call me with my results!

I feel so outraged with the way I was treated by the second triage nurse, they made me feel so small with the way they spoke to me. As a nurse I feel their duty of care is to listen and communicate better. I’m really annoyed (to put it lightly) that I asked if the doctor could call me with my results and was told no only to be told hours later by another nurse that the doctor would call me with my results! What a waste of my time when I should have been resting not sitting amongst sick people with my baby. If this is the standard way for a nurse to treat patients then quite frankly I find Broome Hospital appalling.

I find breastfeeding in public uncomfortable in normal circumstances but when you add in the pain from mastitis it was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had. Not only that but my newborn baby was exposed to all the germs in that room for over six hours and now I feel that is why my baby is sick. 

I feel if I was offered a bed or private space earlier that my experience could have been a lot better (and when I was eventually offered this privacy there was a lot of free beds, so room wasn’t an issue it seems).