March 10, 2026

We are experiencing an extremely high call volume

I call the small hospital’s health system often. My children’s pediatrician is within this system as are most of my parents’ specialists and our primary care providers.

At many of the offices now AI is answering and taking me through an annoying menu of options and asking me questions that I assume lessen their liability more than they are useful. Almost every time I call any of the offices I wait on hold for several minutes and hear a recorded statement “we are experiencing an unusually high call volume.” When a human being answers it is typically someone working from home and after I talk with them I typically am transferred to the front desk of the office I am calling (and stating the name and date of birth of the patient for the second time or more).

Last evening as soon as I finished my final online session of the day for work I called the pediatrician’s office at 4:59 PM hoping I would get someone before they closed. After going through AI and getting the first person who took down my information I was disconnected while waiting on hold to be connected with the front desk of the pediatrician’s office. I was very honest in sharing that my daughter had not been feeling well for the second time in a month and explained why I thought the same issue had returned based on her symptoms. I repeated myself multiple times to multiple different people and they had no sick visits available for over a week. We have decent insurance benefits but I still asked them to squeeze my daughter in if not today the next day and one of the nurse’s that called said that they sometimes open appointments same day and that I should call in the morning while in the meantime my daughter is very uncomfortable.

I told them, which maybe I shouldn’t have that I would probably end up going to their urgent care if she could not get an appointment to be seen but expressed frustration about this because it is more expensive to do that and it would be much nicer if our pediatrician was not just for well visits.

My husband came home from work and decided just to spend his entire evening at Urgent Care with our daughter and she did in fact have something they found that needed to be treated. Someone from the office called me hours later once he had already left to take my daughter to Urgent Care Care and she was calling to let me know that the doctor looked at my daughter’s chart and wanted this staff member to tell us to just go to urgent care. Great.

I can’t help but feel that they are funneling us to the urgent care facilities and don’t mind that we waste a lot of personal time waiting (and having our sick daughter sit and wait) instead of having an appointment scheduled because as an organization they then get to charge us more to be seen.

Specialists are scheduling months out just for the intake appointment and treatment is further out. But you can receive waiting list texts for which you’d better stop everything you are doing immediately and check your calendar and respond as fast as you can or it will be gone.