Mom vs. Doctor in Waiting Game

Rummaging around my living room on a late afternoon, I heard voices on my driveway. It was my girlfriend and her infant daughter out for a walk. I tossed the toys I was picking up into the playpen, and ran downstairs to call out to them. “Hey guys, wanna come in for a bit?”

My friend, an attractive woman in her early 30s, is friendly and always up for a chat. On this particular day, though, I could tell something wasn’t right. Her face was pale and drawn. As I came out my front door, she held out her hand to stop me.

“Don’t get too close, I’m as sick as a dog,” she warned. “We just got back from the doctor; you wouldn’t believe how long I waited. My daughter was all over the place--more than 90 minutes. It was awful.”

There are plenty of things that put moms on the edge, and among the best-kept secrets driving women mad is the truth about what’s going on in doctors’ waiting rooms.

Here’s the typical scenario. Your child’s checkup is at 9 a.m. Hoping to beat the four other families also scheduled for that time, you arrive at 8:45.

After half an hour, the doctor comes in, having just arrived in the building. He looks sheepishly at us in reception, then disappears behind the nurses station.

Ten more minutes pass before you’re taken to the exam room, and given the false impression that it’s almost your turn. The nurse comes and says it will be “just a minute.” By the time the doctor does appear, it can be a full hour after your original appointment time.

In seven years of visiting a pediatrician’s office, I have continued to ask myself the question “What’s taking so long?” There are a few comforting responses like, “There was an emergency at the hospital”; “They’re taking extra time with someone seriously ill;” and “They’ve had a lot of walk-ins.”

These answers work fine until my toddler starts throwing a fit in the exam room and knocks over the jar of tongue depressors. And the occasional delay in any service-oriented facility is understandable. We wait for an oil change, for a table at a busy restaurant, for the plumber who shows up at 4 instead of 1.

But there’s something about the doctor’s office that’s particularly troubling. The appointments for regular checkups are sometimes scheduled weeks in advance. The doctors, all of whom I personally like and professionally respect, seem committed to providing good care and probably don’t like running late.

But take a look at their calendar, and it’s clear that Time Management and Business 101 would be welcome course requirements in medical school.

First, most doctors’ offices close every day from noon until 2 p.m. This is a huge inconvenience and break in the day. Working moms can’t take a lunch break and have their child examined. Try to phone for a later appointment at that time and the answering service says, “We don’t handle the schedule; you’ll have to call back after 2.”

In today’s competitive business environment, this really isn’t the best way to run a practice. Sure, during the shutdown, nurses catch up on paperwork and take a warranted lunch break. But does that mean the entire office has to go into a holding pattern until the early afternoon? Why not stay open and have shifts like other establishments, so that patient care can continue without interruption? Wouldn’t this allow for more time, and hence on-time appointments?

Second, doctors could reexamine their schedules and shorten patients’ wait. Maybe they’re taking on too many new cases and need to scale back. Solicit the help of an MBA candidate for how to maximize efficiency during office hours. Perhaps that means taking more of a customer-service-oriented approach, such as waiving a co-payment if the wait is more than 30 minutes. Changing something is better than nothing.

The other side of this coin is that patients need to speak up about the value of their time. Once, after waiting over 45 minutes, I simply went up to the receptionist and said, “I have somewhere to be, and so I’m going to have to reschedule this visit.” Despite three other families waiting before me, the nurse quickly rushed me to the exam room. I felt bad for the frustrated onlookers, but it revealed a lot about what never changes so long as one stays silent. An old saying sums it up quite perfectly: “Patience has limits. Take it too far, and it’s cowardice.”