Hero to Zero

<p>My wife fell and hurt her wrist, after procrastinating all afternoon, she could bare the pain no longer. It was too late to contact our GP and we went to Sandton Clinic, even though we had a bad experience before with my daughter when after breaking her nose during a cheerleading incident.</p> <p>After waiting an hour my daughter was triaged and sent to x-rays. When the foreign doctor read her x-rays he said there was there was no break and nothing to worry about. The following week her nose looked kind of wonky and we decided to have a specialist look at it. Thank god we did, he advised that it was a serious break and she needed surgery involving the re-breaking and resetting of her nose, which we had done immediately at substantial cost.</p> <p>So as you may imagine we were apprehensive to attempt this again. We opted to give them the benefit of doubt. From the moment we entered the emergency room the sole focus was money who is paying who is guarantor what is covered how much extra their rates are who pays more who pays less etc. etc. Being on medical aid I didn’t have to worry but was bombarded by payment details. We were told there was only 1 doctor on station. Then we waited to be triaged 1 hour and 15 minutes. I have somewhat of a medical background and usually you are triaged before you wait. When we went into triage, they did not even know why we were there. I do not believe the receptionist even had a medical background or wrote anything down, most likely he was only a cashier.</p> <p>The triage nurse was good and new what she was doing, seeing my wife was in pain she quickly ran through her checklist and took her over to the x-ray department. Again we were asked to provide medical aid details for billing before she could be attended to. The technician seemed fairly proficient and did the x-rays quickly.</p> <p>We were told to go back over to the waiting area, which we did. After waiting again I asked the receptionist what to do, he went and asked a nurse who took us back into the emergency ward (good thing we asked or we could have been waiting another hour). We were ushered into a small examination room and told the doctor would be with us shortly. Quite frankly by this time I was expecting him to bring a card machine with him.</p> <p>The mumbling doctor eventually showed up and without examining her wrist at all informed us that he had looked at the x-rays and there were no broken bones and everything was ok. As you may expect after our previous encounter we were sceptical and asked for a second opinion from an orthopaedic specialist. We were advised that there was no-one on call or available to give an opinion, seems funny with today’s technology it could not be emailed or WhatsApp’ed for an opinion.</p> <p>We requested that a qualified Radiologist give an opinion and again were told that there was no radiologist available (who was the technician who did the x-rays). We requested copies of the x-rays so that we may get a second. After 2 minutes the doctor departed and we left to the reception where we were handed a bill for R550.00 which I was told was for emergency room and administration and had to be paid immediately and was not covered by medical aid. After Paying I asked if there were any other hidden payments and was told that the seemingly *********** doctor and the non-existent radiologist would send his bill directly to our medical aid.</p> <p>In truth I had NO confidence in the doctor whatsoever, I would rather have had the triage nurse examine my wife.</p>