by Michael J. Flexer, Semiotician, and Tom Abba, Designer
I had quite a bad fall recently. The ambulance came quickly. They did everything, heart, everything, but they couldn’t bandage. So, all the wounds. Four of them, bad wounds. The nurse would come and nothing happened. This was on a Tuesday and on the Wednesday, they said maybe somebody will come on Thursday. Well, all these wounds, weeping and bleeding and I happened to have a hospital appointment for something and so one of the people who rang me said, ‘ah, that’s it. When you’re in the hospital, don’t let them send you home. Get transferred to A&E.’ I got transferred to A&E. They did the job beautifully. I then waited four and a half hours to come home. I went to downstairs dispatch, upstairs dispatch, downstairs dispatch, upstairs dispatch, upstairs … And it went on like that until finally they let me sit in upstairs dispatch for four and a half hours. They are busy, I know, but apparently, they’d lost me. I was a parcel and they weren’t sure of the address. It’s quite funny in a way. After an hour, I said to somebody, ‘I’m not very obvious here, should I be somewhere where I can be seen?’ He said, ‘no, stay there.’ Then, after another hour, he said. ‘what are you still doing here?’ It wasn’t terribly crowded. One interesting thing was, when I went there, they were aware that I had phoned 111. So, when you go into the reception, they say, ‘okay, you phoned 111 and so you just sit there and wait,’ and a lady came in and she went right to the front of the queue and she said, ‘I’m different. I’m 111.’ And somebody said, ‘well, we’re all 111.’ Makes you wonder if you’ll ever get in if you’re not 111. I don’t know. At my clinic, if you have a test done, you don’t ring up and ask for a result. They tell you, ‘we’ll tell you if you need to come back.’ But they make mistakes. It’s not positive enough in my mind. You should ring up and get the results sometimes.
References
Waiting Times project story archive, University of Exeter and Birkbeck, University of London (funded by the Wellcome Trust).
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