Paging Dr. Shit Disturber

“There’s no reason for you to be in this room. Get dressed and go wait in the waiting room until the surgery team has time to see you”.

Those are the curt words I hear from the staff doc to an elderly man with a low hemoglobin who says he has been experiencing increasing bright red blood per rectum since his colonoscopy two weeks ago. The patient is staring at the doctor dumbstruck and calls him an obnoxious jerk before he starts to make his way to the waiting room.

I too was dumbstruck because I’ve never seen a patient (who’s not triaged to the fast track area) kicked out of the room at the whim of a doc in a bad mood. The staff doc walked away before I got a chance to ask what happened. Before kicking the patient out of the room, the staff doc declined to tell the patient that we were waiting for his PT/INR and that he was referred to surgery. Understandably the patient thought that he was being denied adequate care. He went to the waiting room and told the triage nurse that he would not leave until he had been properly assessed by a physician. The triage nurse was thoroughly confused and irritated by the situation because she can’t be keeping an eye on a patient who has already been assigned to an area inside the department.

When the charge nurse confronted the doctor about the situation, he became irate with us all and started yelling about how he needs free rooms for patient assessments and that a patient waiting for a consultation can’t be keeping a room occupied. That might have been a valid argument had we been short on rooms and the waiting room was full. However, it was a very quiet night – 13 rooms were free, the waiting room only had 4 people waiting to be triaged and all were candidates for fast track. Furthermore, patients waiting for consultations (especially surgery) are kept in a room so the nurse can continuously assess them, especially those with low hemoglobin counts and are bleeding!

The patient was brought back inside the department and I decided that he should go back to his room. When the staff doc saw the patient back in his room at the nurses’ insistence, his temper further flared and he started to curse under his breath while he randomly started to bring in patients who weren’t even registered in the system creating a gigantic mess for the entire department. Basically he was acting like a little bitch!

The patient was eventually discharged but not before the entire staff (including the surgeons) told him to file a complaint with patient relations.

Later on during the night, he forgot to order a head CT for a patient. When I brought that little error to his attention, he bitched at ME for not entering it into the system. I had to not so gently remind him that it is the PHYSICIAN’S responsibility to order CTs – the computer system won’t let me do it because I don’t have the appropriate privileges! Ass!

I’ve foolishly agreed to work a lot more shifts than is probably healthy so I’m really hoping that he’s not the staff doc - I might just end up strangling him Homer Simpson style and further exacerbate the Canadian physician shortage!