Telecare – DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME

I am the father of a 18 month old.  When I heard about this “telecare” thing where I could get a certified Nurse on the phone who would talk to me about the symptoms I was seeing and we could take action from there, I was to say the least very excited.

This on the surface sounds like a great concept,  I mean the old 8 hour wait at the emergency room would now be over right?!  Yeah keep DREAMING!

This is a total waste of time!  You get on the phone, talk to a nurse for 30 minutes,  They ask you if you beat your child?!  “AHH NO!”  They ask you if have given them medication that you shouldn’t have, “AHH NO!”  or else I wouldn’t have called you.

So after you get grilled on the quality of parent you are for 30 minutes, they say, “you should go see a doctor as soon as possible”.  No kidding, I should have gone to see the doctor before I wasted the 30 minutes on the phone with this useless service.

This all stems from a situation on the weekend.  My child swallowed something, although we didn’t know what he swallowed, we knew what it wasn’t.  It wasn’t medication (we don’t have any)/ It wasn’t sharp (where he was playing there couldn’t have been anything sharp)/ and it wasn’t poison (we saw him playing right in front of us).  We believed it to be a penny.

We didn’t believe it to be too serious, we just wanted to know if we would be able to tell if he still had something trapped in his throat and what the symptoms would be.  They got me so worked up telling me “well Mister, if you want to take the chance with an 18 month old that’s your decision.”

So we rushed my child to the emergency room.  The nurse at the emergency room asked us some simple questions,   “do you know what he swallowed”?  she said.  I said, “no I am not sure what he swallowed but I can tell you what it wasn’t.” So she went down the list of things that we would need to take action on right away and we determined that it couldn’t have been any of those items.  And by process of elimination we determined that he would need to pass it naturally.

I say it is time to get rid of Telecare.  All it is doing is delaying you from going to a doctor anyway.  The fact is, you still end up going.