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his practice is proving a frantic place to work. Today is no exception; everything seems to be happening all at once, and already the team are tetchy and flustered. It’s breast-screening week and there are two enormous temporary facilities taking up most of the car park. As a result, patients are arriving late, complaining about having to park on the other side of town. We also have a steady stream of ladies coming into the surgery by mistake, having somehow, in their anxiety, missed the giant vans and signage outside. One lady even made it into a doctor’s office and was starting to take her top off before she was noticed and redirected outside. To add to the mayhem, one of the nurses is off sick today, which means appointments are running an hour behind and the waiting room is crammed. This particular nurse – let’s call her Scarlet – has had every Monday off for the last 2 months. At least, I reckon she has, but Delia, the administrator, has ‘mislaid’ the sickness records. Has she really lost them, or is she just causing trouble for me? It’s hard to tell. Nurse Scarlet is always missing in action. If it’s not her regular Monday malady, it’s a problem with her car, or some other emergency. She has had so many days off for funerals that she must be running out of relatives. Someone should sit her down and talk about her attendance, but without proper records it’s very hard to manage staff absence properly. You may have gathered that I’m trying to find my way in a new practice. Some things here are superbly organised, like the online training platform, but other things, like our HR records, are a total mess. I find myself saying over and over: “In my last practice we had a system for that” in a way that must be quite irritating for other staff. So, I’m doing my best to hold my tongue and get things sorted out one step at a time. The senior partner, Dr Dodson (in my head I call him Dr Dodders), does not help. He continues to manage things in his own particular shambolic way, leaving me to run around undoing his mistakes and trying, belatedly, to get the paperwork straight.
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