Columnist ROBERT MACKLIN finds himself disempowered and struggling with the condescension bordering on contempt from staff amid the daily chaos that is Canberra Hospital’s emergency department. Until he makes a break for it… 

Midnight: A blue plastic curtained cubicle among the “beds” beyond the public reception chaos of Canberra Hospital’s Emergency Department. 

THE white light of the vast room has become almost unendurable. The machines that go “ping” are spearing into the brain, as they have for the past three hours.

Suddenly, from the adjoining cubicle, comes a woman’s heart-rending burst of sobs. 

My son Ben and I had met her briefly in ED chaos central, a short, slim lady (whom we’ll call Estelle) from Canberra’s inner south, a daily walker who that day had suffered a pain in the chest. 

She had followed us an hour later into the emergency “ward” and her story was similar to my own – ordered by a GP to the ED for symptoms of possible pulmonary embolism – that’s a blood clot that can kill you instantly or reach the brain to deliver a stroke that leaves you permanently disabled.

Estelle sobbed again. No staff was available to respond, so kindly Ben went to the gap in the plastic blue curtains and asked if he could help, perhaps find a nurse…”They just left me here,” she wept, “no one has said a word to me; and my husband is away on a fishing trip. I didn’t want to worry him. I just did what my GP told me to do…” 

Same here, I thought, though my symptoms followed a “procedure” at Calvary Private the very night it became “Bruce” which tickled me no end at the time.

Ben and I had reached the ED with my GP’s referral letter at 5pm. We then waited four hours in the Monday chaos before the call to the cubicles and, dressed in work clothes from the waist down with a gown on an otherwise naked top, we inmates occupied the movable bunks that would occasionally ferry me to the various X-ray and scanning installations. 

There was no rhyme nor reason given for the wait. Asking questions is frowned upon by the triage staff, and the nurses are given no information from the all-high panjandrums, the doctors who dispense their opinions only to junior doctors. The juniors very occasionally call by the cubicle and take some pleasure, it seems, in withholding the results of the various tests. 

“The doctor (panjandrum) is looking at it now,” they say. But there is no “now” in Canberra Hospital ED. 

At least I had Ben to chat with as the minutes turned to hours of tortured pings (in clashing musical keys) and the hours to the very edge of human endurance. Then from the blue cubicle, “I’ve had enough!” Estelle cried. “I’m getting dressed and going home”.

Ben had attracted the attention of a nurse – a kindly Filipino-Australian named Paul who did his best to calm Estelle and promised to get a doctor to at least speak to her. 

However, such was the apparent busyness in Panjandrum Land that Estelle had reached the end of her tether. Only the panicked Paul’s pleading kept her in the cubicle bed till finally an emissary reached her.

Then began a contest of wills that ended with her decision to stay because they had decided to admit her. The only problem was they didn’t have a bed in any of the wards on the sixth floor where us pulmonary embolism folk were headed. Oh, yes, I had a similar message from a different but equally non-committal emissary. 

He said the “Bed Manager” would organise it. But just at the moment there weren’t any available. There is no “moment” at Canberra Hospital ED, only a flat line with no ending. However, said the emissary, “Bed Manager” is doing his (or her) best so… “ping, ping, a-ping, da-ping…ing, ping…da-da-ping…”

My watch said it’s well after midnight. I sent dear Ben home to his own family and the big job he was handling in the APS. On went the pings; on went the minutes until at 1am Estelle cracked. “I don’t care,” she told Paul tearfully, “I’ll find my car in the parking lot and that’s it.”

A shadow passed on the other side of the blue plastic curtains. At least the sobbing stopped. Still, I raised the Bed Manager issue with another passing nurse, a youngster named Elizabeth: “What could the Bed Manager do at 1.30am to secure me a bed in a ward, short of something too ghastly to mention?”

“I wish I could be more helpful,” she said. “But I just don’t know.”

“So really, I could stay here all night with the machines that ping and the white light and the absolute exhaustion that is becoming very bad for my health?” I said.

“I’m afraid so.”

Well, I thought, if Estelle could make a break, so could I.

When Elizabeth departed, I surreptitiously peeled off the stickers that had held the scanning nodules to my chest and sides, then with a glance at the mobile (2am, almost out of charge), I called Paul. And he did his level best to keep me, even promising that the boss panjandrum herself might be along “soon”. 

But by then I knew, there is no “soon” at Canberra Hospital ED. And so, I suspect, did he. In fact, kindly chap that he is, he finally put me in a wheelchair and off we went. Marvellous, it felt like a scene from “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. 

A quick stop at the now deserted reception room to call a cab, then out into the freezing cold just as it arrived. Paul promised to have them send the test results to the GP later that morning.

Ten minutes later down empty streets and home.

I take a charitable view, that the panjandrums really are terribly important and incredibly busy making life and death decisions. 

But does that excuse the condescension bordering on contempt they show to the Canberra folk who, with their Medicare card and a lifetime’s contribution to the Medicare levy, expect a health system worthy of the name? 

Sadly, I discovered, there is a great gap between the well-staffed facilities of Bruce Private and the condescending chaos of Canberra Hospital. The British call it the “class” system; we pretend it doesn’t exist. Canberra Hospital ED laughs in our faces.

robert@robertmacklin.com