re: How long will you wait on a Dr. before leaving?

You make a great point. Communication with the patient about any wait time is important. We failed at this on a number of occasions. Emergencies may take 30 mins or make take 2 hours. When you are in the middle of an emergency your thoughts are completely directed at dealing with the situation. It takes as long as it takes. Our PA was invaluable to be able to communicate this to patient's waiting in the office or waiting to be seen while hospitalized. It was crazy overall. While on call I would get up to 30 calls per day while doing procedures in the morning. Very disruptive. These (mostly necessary) calls were from either doctors or nurses on the hospital ward or from the ER or from my office or outside physicians. There was no one else to take the calls because my partners not on call were up to their necks in taking care of patient's as well. Don't even get me started on the nightmare of electronic health records with the wasted time on putting in data, erroneous and unimportant if not dangerous data put it by non medical people, wasted time on EHR when that time should have been spent on taking actual care of the patient including time to contemplate complicated situations. Damn, I'm glad I'm done. I miss taking care of patients but I do not miss all the other bullshite. At the back end of my career I was working 80 hour call weeks. Honestly, I was completely worn out by thursday of the week with several days still to go. Talk about having to be completely focused on the task at hand in order to prevent making mistakes when completely exhausted. It was much easier to handle this when I was in my 30s than when in my late 50's. I envied doctors that had a more relaxed schedule but some of us did not have that luxury.