Over the last few years I have had the pleasure of spending a reasonably large proportion of time in waiting rooms at either hospitals or Doctors Surgeries. On and off I have given the matter some thought and it is time to share these with the world.
I have two case studies, first the Doctors Surgery:
If you have an appointment at a medical centre and it is the first appointment of the day - it will be late, on rare occasions it will be early but it will never be on time. After that as the appointments continue through the day, they get later and later. So a 9:10 will happen at 9:30 (even if the 9:00 took place at 8:50), the 9:30 will be at 10:00 and so on. But the 12:20 appointment (the last before lunch) and the 18:00 (the last of the day) will always be on time. I cannot explain how this works but it does. Using the above principle that the 17:40 appointment will be at least an hour late but the last appointment at 18:00 will still happen then - the obvious answer is to either get the last appointment in a session or the first knowing that the wait will be the least of all the patients excepting the last.
Second case study, the hospital clinic:
Here things work differently as an NHS clinic can have three sorts of patient:
1. The pre-booked weeks in advance by the appointments clerks patient,
2. The pre-booked by the consultant appointment and
3.The ‘oh shit’ needs to be seen as they came in via A&E and need followup patient.
So what happens here is that your appointment will never happen on time. This is because the consultant earns a packet on the NHS, they also earn a packet doing private work and want to retire and play golf. So they don’t care if they stay late in the evenings because more work now means more golf later. So accordingly they deal with the emergency patients first, and the booked ones get fitted in. Where this goes to pieces is that the appointments booked by the clerks have filled all the bookable slots, so the emergency cases and the ones the consultant wants to see because they need to be seen have to be fitted in.
BUT there is something that the patient can do to speed things along. It is quite simple, fairly cheap and hopefully most patients can manage it in this day and age. Ready? Take a book. Really it works. My own observations have come to the following conclusions:
1. If I don’t take a book I have to wait hours sometimes (appt at 3 taking place at 6 for example).
2. If I do take a book and I am the only person with a book, it will take an age to get into the book because of distractions (more on this in a bit) but once I do get into the story I will be seen fairly quickly.
3. Everyone takes a book in which case the wait is minimal (though I have to admit I have yet to see the nirvana of a quiet waiting room because everyone is waiting) and everyone gets seen fairly quickly, this is i have to admit theory.
So really take a book. At the worst it will keep you entertained.
Back to distractions, these vary from a toddler screaming, a couple having a row, the old boy snoring in the corner (perhaps he went to the wrong clinic) and my all time favourite ‘The Complainer’.
The Complainer is a special breed and work their way up into full flow in stages:
1. they cannot find a chair they like in a location they like, so they settle on a chair and move it to where they want it, which is invariably in everyone else’s way. They sigh.
2. the waiting room is either too hot or too cold and so they keep taking their coat on and off and sighing loudly about how hospitals should have air conditioning.
3. even though they arrive early, they will keep checking their watch, the more they check the louder they tut.
4. they find a book/magazine and start to read and then stop, sit bolt upright and announce that there is either not enough or too much light for them to read comfortably.
5. the insist on talking to the people in the immediate area - particularly the person who is trying to read a book.
6. once they have started talking they then start complaining that hospitals were never this bad under the previous government and that something should be done.
7. they have now realised that their appointment should have happened 10 minutes previously and they go and see the receptionist to complain that they should have been seen. They then return in a huff and repeat point 6 above.
7. Around twenty minutes later a nurse or one of the admin staff will announce that the appointments are running approximately 45 minutes late and thank everyone for their patience. This is the final straw, they stand up and announce that this is completely unacceptable as their appointment was book six months previously and a hospital should be able to keep appointments made in advance.
8. They simmer for a while, then find the nearest member of hospital staff (who it is is irrelevant) and repeat the point just made adding in about tax payers money and how they are very important, how hospitals have gone to the dogs and that they have an appointment at the hairdressers / bookeepers / whatever in 20 minutes that is much more important than sitting in a waiting room at a hospital. The reply they receive varies dependent on the member of staff:
a. the cleaner - shrug - ’speek leeetle Ginglish’
b. the receptionist - ‘the appointments are booked, you will be seen and no I don’t know why things are running late - medical reasons I expect’
c. a nurse - ‘look we are very busy, I know you have a booked appointment but we do have emergency cases that need dealing with as a matter of priority, you will be seen in due course’
d. the consultant - ‘I have been here since 8 am, performed several operations this morning, had a dodgy cheese sandwich for lunch and am now trying to do my clinic, if your case was urgent I would have seen as soon as you came in, everyone will get seen and nobody will be here later than me, so please sit down and shut up’.
The reactions tend to vary as follows:
a. ‘well you are bloody useless’ - and move on to b.
b. ‘you should know it is your job’ - and move on to c.
c. ‘that is completely unacceptable I demand to be seen now’ - and then sit down in a huff.
d. ‘oh’ - at which point they either sit down quietly or they walk out in a rage threatening to write to their MP etc.
