Accessibility

I am Dr. Vernon Rowe, head of the MidAmerica Neuroscience Institute.

Patients sometimes say to me in disbelief "I can't believe I didn't have to wait for three or four months to see you" or to see someone in our institute. I cant explain why wait lists for neurologists are so long. I know there is a great need for neurologists in our subspecialty culture of medicine these days. I know there are not nearly enough and there are not enough in the training programs. It seems to me it is more of a scheduling issue and a prioritization issue than anything else why these waits are so long.

What we have done at MidAmerica Neuroscience is realize that when a family physician, internist, or other primary care provider decides that a patient needs to go to a neurologist and knows that patient is going to have to wait months to get into a neurologist, we know that is not good patient care. It is not good patient care for the patients themselves and it does not really help the whole system of getting patients fixed and on with their lives.

We have set up a different scheduling procedure here at MidAmerica Neuroscience Institute and that is that we always have available slots for experienced clinicians to see patients every day of the week so that patients who have intractable headache or have a new kind of headache or think they might have multiple sclerosis or are worried about a loved one having a memory problem or have been told that they are falling asleep and they or their spouse are worried about a sleep disorder or they have bad neck pain or back pain or a new numbness or weakness that they have not experienced before, we have slots available for those patients to see because we have just planned it that way. I dont know why everybody else doesnt do that. I think it probably has to do with just an appreciation of how important it is to see patients who are having these problems in a timely manner.

That is at least one thing that we can say about MidAmerica Neuroscience, that we can evaluate patients rapidly with many of the problems that drive patients to neurologists.

Now this is not to say that if you have the acute onset of stroke symptoms that you should not go to a hospital, you should go to a hospital. You should seek out a hospital emergency room that has a stroke program, but you should definitely go to a hospital if you even think that you might be having a stroke or if you definitely are having a stroke. You know because you have had one before or someone close to you has had one. Again, those warning signs of a stroke, sudden onset of loss of vision in one eye or the other, sudden onset of double vision, problems walking, sudden onset of weakness or numbness of an arm or a leg, all those things should drive you immediately to a hospital emergency room with a stroke program.

The other problems that now have to wait for months to be evaluated in a neurologist's office -- we get patients in within three to four days.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• Clip137