Family doctor should mediate quickly appointment specialist

For a faster specialist appointment ask your doctor for help

04/16/2014

Patients often have to wait a very long time to get an appointment with a specialist. Although you can object to it, it is crucial if faster treatment is absolutely necessary. In urgent cases, the family doctor should be asked to make an appointment with a specialist.

In urgent cases ask your family doctor for help
It often takes a long time for patients to get an appointment with a specialist. Although you can object to it, it is crucial whether faster treatment is also urgently needed. Claudia Schlund of the Independent Patient Counseling Germany (UPD) advises that patients in urgent cases should ask their family doctor to make an appointment with the specialist for them. This has the advantage that the family doctor as an expert can better justify why a faster treatment is needed.

Waiting times in the waiting room can be avoided
„At a normal control date, you can do relatively little. It's ultimately about whether it's really urgent“, explained Maw, according to the news agency dpa. In addition, one could also ask health insurances or the Kassenärztliche association for a mediation. In acute cases, waiting times can be avoided even in the waiting room. „Reasonable is up to half an hour. If it is foreseeable that it will take longer, a medical assistant must inform the patient about a longer waiting period“, so maw. The doctor's office must arrange a replacement appointment if necessary. „It must not be that a patient sits in the waiting room for three hours. That would be a bad organization of practice.“

Patients can be refused because of overload
However, it is generally true that there is no obligation to treat, if there is no emergency. Therefore, physicians may also refuse patients for overuse if they do not need to be treated acutely. For some specialists, however, a certain time is also taken into account in which patients can be inserted without appointment. Patients who experience acute pain should immediately refer to their condition in order to find a place in the specialist's tight schedule. „A doctor can not break up though. But then he can send the patient to another doctor, for example, if he thinks it makes sense“, so maw.

Privately insured persons come to the train faster
Many patients in this country have to wait longer than three weeks for an appointment with the specialist. The waiting times in the East are on average longer than in the West, as a survey of more than 6,000 health insured of the research group Elections for the Kassenärztliche Bundesvereinigung (KBV) showed last year. The KBV report also said that private insured tend to get on the train faster. A UPD spokeswoman said back then that a doctor can not refuse anyone in acute, serious illness, but a flu-like infection with a head cold and a cough can put a patient off to the next day when the practice is very busy. (Sb)