A few “five minutes late” appointments go by, and before you know it they’re an hour behind! It’s crazy
Let’s blame them.
Speaking from experience, we’re an hour behind because 20 people were 5 minutes late
My mother does two things whenever I take her to a doctor’s appointment:
- Complain to everyone if she has to wait even a few minutes for her appointment to start
- Endlessly ask the doctor pointless questions, repeat herself over and over again with the preface “and as I said”, and generally babble so her own appointment goes long past its scheduled length
And definitely not from the over scheduling. Yep definitely not that.
You don’t overschedule, people start complaining that too many doctors aren’t taking new patients. You try to increase the amount of doctors and people complain about immigration. Can’t win
Powerful lobbies are surpressing the number of doctors practicing in the US. If a foreign doctor wants to emigrate and practice here they cannot until they pass TOEFL (reasonable) AND finish US-based residencies, of which there are few. I know a Russian dermatologist who has been a receptionist for years because she cannot get ECFMG certification. Some states are wising up and waiving the residencies, but way more need to do it.
I’m not complaining about immigration. Only idiots and assholes complain about that.
Doctors might schedule less patients per day and increase the number of patients seen overall. It’s not like over scheduling doesn’t have other effects besides being infuriating. It means they rush through the visit, ask few follow-up questions and decrease the chance I’ll have a solution in that one visit. I may have to come back again after the useless piece of non-applicable advice they gave me doesn’t work.
I guess a lot of lemmings work in doctors offices or something. It’s not an unfair ask at all to not routinely wait many minutes past your appointment time. It’s very fair. Yet itt several users push back against this idea as though the waiting isn’t anyone’s fault. Yes, it is. And we deserve better.
As a professional patient, trust me, I know. Short, pointless appointments are the bane of my existence. But I’m rural, and someone not taking patients can mean I have to travel a couple hours to the nearest big city. It’s a giant asspain all around
I mean - it already takes months to get an appointment. If they schedule even fewer patients I don’t see that improving either.
If they schedule fewer patients then maybe they’d feel like they have time to talk to me and we’d actually solve my issue so I don’t come back two weeks later, further gumming up the system. “Even fewer”? A recent doctor experience I had was arriving early for a 9:45 appointment to an absolutely jam packed waiting room where I had to wait literally almost two hours to be seen. By your logic, they weren’t seeing many patients and it’s a bad solution to see fewer. At one point it was announced they were about an hour behind schedule. Even that was very incorrect for me, almost by a factor of 2.
I cannot pinpoint all the problems behind the scenes but it’s 100% clear multiple people are not operating honestly. If you make an appointment time, you should plan to not have patients wait hours past that. You the doctor office did something wrong and it was avoidable. They probably over scheduled and then also the doctor came in late. Again I don’t know the details but I do know they fucked up and that’s not uncommon and it’s also not something to dismiss as patients expecting too much.
There’s a huge problem with staffing and insurance bullshit in the medical field. 20 years ago, if I got sick I could see my GP usually the same day. Now it takes months to get an appointment, so people go to urgent care or the ER.
A doctor friend explained to me years ago a huge part is insurance companies. He explained that if he prescribed an MRI, he personally had to speak to an adjuster on the phone that had a literal timer requiring them to be on the phone for 20 minutes. They want to inconvenience the doctors into not prescribing procedures or medicines that cost more money.
Yeah, I agree the system is fucked up from the top down. Doctors do not deserve all the blame for sure. Mainly, I’m just likely to not be forgiving of crazy wait times if the doctor also sucks at providing care. A lot of them do suck, unfortunately. Really makes you appreciate the good ones.
Or dealing with someone’s life threatening emergency and pretending it’s people being late.
I’d rather wait for the doctor that takes its time to diagnose everyone than the one that is always on time
I would rather they manage their appointments like they value everyone’s time. Not everyone has an hour to wait PAST when they say they are available.
Maybe the one that’s always on time is just really good at diagnosing.
“Cancer. Get out. Erectile dysfunction. Get out. Missing a leg. Get out.”
Dam I thought it was just an inner ear infection giving me balance issues.
One of the skills doctors need is to be able to not only look that the most apparent option because should they diagnose wrong the patient is in a even worse position. Medicine is not a okams razor field, getting the diagnosis right precedes getting it fast.
In US, money precedes diagnosis. Now give me $850 and try again with another doctor
How Covid didn’t end with a modern Black Plague incident in the US is beyond me.
Yes it’s much better to diagnose issues with no diagnostic criteria.
And you get Fibromyalgia, and you get IBS, and you get some Lupus
I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas
Then refuse to treat them. That’s for another doctor
I postponed a visit for months because of covid and Quarantäne. At thr moment, it seemed like a really important visit.
Almost lost the turn, commuted through the whole city… the doctor arrived 2,5 hours late. She was not even sorry.
Last visit, the woman at the desk told me my doctor was running an hour behind. I knew that meant I’d be waiting closer to two hours. I sighed, sat down, thought for a moment, and went back to the desk to reschedule the appointment. I did the doctor and me a favor. She got a free spot in her schedule to catch up, and I didn’t need to sit around for two hours.
A few years ago I was heading to the major city children hospital near us for a post op follow up for my kid. GPS said it would take 1.5hrs to get there so I left 2hrs early to make sure we get parking and we’re able to get to the appointment early. Well traffic ended up being so bad it took 4hrs to get to the hospital. I called ahead of time and asked if it was ok that we still go to the appointment because we were running way later than expected. The doc office said it was fine and to just get there as soon as we could. So we got to to hospital and up to the office and they saw us right away. Well the doc gets in the room and she starts yelling at me about being late and how disrespectful it is and how us being late impacts everyone’s day. I apologized a few times as she continued to yell. Finally I said calmly “ok lady we get it. I apologized and I called ahead and your office folks said it was fine.”. Well she lost it on me after that. She said “DO NOT SCREAM AT ME OR THREATEN ME!”, then she told the nurse to call security to escort me out. I very calmly said “I did not yell. I did not threaten anyone. I simply said we understood and I don’t need to be lectured on it. It’s sounds like we all have had a stressful morning so let’s just continue with the appointment and call it a day.” And that is exactly what we did. Any followup we have had since then has been very pleasant. Just caught her on a bad day I guess.
Better than me. I would’ve had an attitude every time I had to go back.
Thankfully we only have to see her once every 6 months or so. Plus she’s been absolutely great since the incident. I think she was probably a little embarrassed afterwards.
They’re an hour behind schedule because everyone ahead of you was 5 minutes late.
Once, I was literally 2 minutes late. The doctor was busy talking to a nurse and only asked for me in 5 minutes, at which point he asked me why I’m almost 10 minutes late.
If you’re 5 minutes late, you get seen 40 minutes after your appointment time. If you’re five minutes early, you are seen 10 minutes or more past your appointment time. Yep totally makes sense. And totally makes sense that people itt are making this fact the patients’ faults.
Mine has a smile on their face as long as they can overcharge me for not helping me.
Which is every single time.
Cause and effect. Don’t be late
