When I make an appointment to see my family doctor, and it’s not within the first hour of the office being open (said appointments being a near impossibility to score, as they are practically as precious as diamonds; but more on that anon), I can seriously, and without exaggeration, expect to spend upwards of four hours in his office. Yes, you read that right: Four. HOURS. I promise you, this is not hyperbole. Also (and this is a recent development), when one calls the prescription refill line, one is told, via the recording, that the refill may take up to 72 hours to be written/called in; increasingly, though, it’s taking him four to five days to refill prescriptions. The man is a decent, friendly doctor, but he seriously needs to get a partner (or three) in with him again to help shoulder the workload.
So, is this an anomaly, or is this pretty par for the course, doctor-visit-wise? I mean, really, making an appointment to see my doctor is like going into some inner city clinic.
I used to walk out if I waited over 60 minutes. Once that 1 hour mark hit, I would leave, even if I was in the exam room with my shirt off. I would be sure to tell the practice manager why I was leaving. (My GP was part of a group practice at the hospital where I worked.) One of the managers threatened to bill me for the missed visit; I told her I would bill the practice for my missed work time. She huffed and puffed and turned red, but what could she say?
My family doctor is sometimes 20 minutes late, and she apologizes for it. I could understand once in a great while being later, but four hours? No way I’d stay. I have things to do.
Now, seeing specialists, yes, I’ve seen this sort of thing, but that’s because those bastards will simply make ALL their morning appointments for 8:30, and afternoon appointments for 1, and just let everyone wait.
My brother and my mother-in-law both experienced this with different doctors. My brother’s situation was exactly like yours – if you weren’t first in the door, it became an all-day wait. The doctor was one of the few geriatric specialists who saw Medicaid patients, and that no doubt contributed to the problem.
My MIL, however, saw a doctor who didn’t even schedule appointments! If you wanted to see her, you just showed up and waited. And waited. And waited. I never understood why she (my MIL) tolerated that, and I also never understood how the doctor thought it was acceptable to keep a bunch of people sitting around for hours, stewing in each other’s pathogens. Yick.
My GP was so popular that had to close their books to new patients a few years ago. If you called in to get an appointment for an ordinary checkup, getting booked 6-8 weeks out was not unheard of.
But, as busy as his practice was, if you had an appointment with him, you weren’t going to be left hanging for several hours. He might be running 15-20 minutes late, but that’s the nature of dealing with squishy humans and their random problems that occasionally become more complicated than originally expected.
My neurosurgeon was San Francisco’s “neurosurgeon’s neurosurgeon” - other doctors went to him for their own issues and sent him their tough cases. Insanely good and insanely in demand - people fly in from across the country to be seen by him. As a result, he ran a tight ship. Most of my appointments with him only involved being in the building for 30 minute, end-to-end.
Regularly orcing patients to wait four hours for a physical is inexcusable.
I’ve never had to wait more than 30-40 minutes, and even that is unusual. Except one time it was over 90 minutes because the doctor had to attend to an emergency. But even then they offered to make me another appointment at a later time.
My dad and I go to the same doctor. He routinely has to wait over an hour to see him, and so do I. The doctor does see a lot of geriatric patients.
Usually when I have a “make an appointment the same day” sort of issue, I end up seeing a nurse practitioner. I’ve never had to wait more than 15 minutes for them.
A couple years ago I went in on a same-day call for an earache and saw a particular CNP who happens to also be the practice’s diabetes specialist. Being that I am Super Fat and had high blood pressure when I saw her that day (I was under a lot of stress and the earache was actually a jaw ache from stress), she sort of took me on as her patient and started wanting to see me regularly. Basically to work with me to stave off actually having diabetes.
Anyway this CNP is pretty cool, and insists the schedulers schedule her appointments for 30 minutes and not 15. I go see her a few times a year and she’s never late and our appointments are meaningful.
Once a year or so she makes me see “the boss” and it’s back to an hour-plus wait and a 15 minute rushed session of “why are you here?” Meh.
I’d love, love, love to change doctors, but am currently without insurance (and am nigh uninsurable, as I have type II diabetes and am somewhat overweight), and the doctors’ offices that I’ve looked into so far all have flat policies against taking uninsured societal vermin, er, people.
But Uh-murr-kuh has the best medical system in the world! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
Sounds to me like your doctor is taking on too many patients.
Here in Winnipeg, Walk-In Clinics are the norm, with many doctors opting to go this route instead of building a family practice. However, I have never waited more than a half-hour to get in to see a doctor, even at a Walk-In.
I have never had that problem with my GP. I often make same day appointments for the afternoon and am usually seen within 15 minutes of my appointment. Unless your doctor is running to the hospital for an emergency, there is really no excuse for a four hour wait. Even then they should try to reschedule you.
When my wife was pregnant, I went with her to her appointments and the waiting was absolutely maddening; usually 45+ minutes in the waiting room and another 1/2 hour in the exam room. Even worse was when - oops - the phlebotomist just left for lunch and won’t be available for that blood draw that we damn well knew you would need for another hour.
My old ob-gyn was horrifically late always. Waiting 2-3 hours to see her was not unusual. I switched and have no trouble now. My dad’s cardiologist is another one who is perpetually late - almost always at least an hour.
I find that specialists are much harder to get in to see. A co-worker’s son needs to see a psychiatrist and he had to wait three months to get into to see one on his insurance plan.
These types of threads make me love my ENT more and more. If I have an appointment with him for 2:00, I’ll arrive at 1:30, be in the office by 1:40 and back to work by 2:00, 2:15 at the latest. He’s a great ENT, he just doesn’t overlap his patients by that much.
I belong to a really cool doctor group in San Francisco who makes house calls.
Granted, 90% of the time I go to his office (and wait less than 10 minutes), but if I am having one of those devastating bouts of the flu, he will come to me and usually within an hour or so of me calling. Of course then I don’t mind the wait.
I realize people have emergency sicknesses or meet with specialists with extremely tight schedules, but if I’m meeting with my family doctor it’s usually a checkup I have scheduled 6 months in advance. I always tell them I don’t care what day they pick, but to schedule me on a day when his first appointment of the day open. I’ve never waited more than 5 minutes. It’s totally worth it.
That’s what it’s like for my GP here in Toronto. Run-of-the-mill things like my annual physical, get booked a couple months in advance, but if I’m sick, I can book and see someone quickly. The last time I had an appointment, it was for 1:15. I walked through the door at 1:10 and before I even had the chance to tell the receptionist who I was, the nurse was calling me in to see the doc.
The only time I sometimes wait is with my sportsmed specialist, but that’s because sometimes exams take unexpectedly long, like he decides to do an ultrasound right there and then, which causes a delay for the following patient.
My dear bride has several doctors.
The wait time for them range from about 30 minutes for her GP to 4-6 hours for her oncologist.
The oncologist is one of the experts on her particular disease (CML) and was instrumental in the development of the drug that saved her life, so waiting for him for the better part of the day every 6 months is less annoying than it seems. After all, we have to fly to Houston to see him and what else would we be doing there other than waiting in a large and noisy (but quite friendly) waiting room?
There is no defense for a doctor being four hours late.
People put up with doctors being late and making people wait for times that they wouldn’t accept from any other professional, because doctors occasionally have to deal with emergencies and such. But even as a private practice doc who maintained a busy hospital service, it wasn’t more than once or twice a year that I had to go to the hospital during my work day and deal with an emergent situation. And when I did I made sure that the patients on my schedule knew what was up and had a chance to reschedule if they didn’t want to wait.
There are a lot of potential bottlenecks in a clinic. In mine (a busy community health center/teaching clinic), it’s mostly the front desk getting people signed in. We also have problems due to what I call the “anti-appointment” culture of our area–asking people to make and keep appointments to see the doc around here is like asking them to bring a live camel with them to their visit. It’s hard to get the staff to understand that people who have appointments and are on time for them are always seen before non-emergent walk-ins. “Can’t you see him really quick? He’s been waiting a long time…”
My advice: find out who owns the clinic. If it’s owned by the doctor himself, there probably isn’t much you can do; a lot of docs have a horrible sense of entitlement about this sort of thing. If it’s owned by someone else and the doc is an employee, complaining directly to the owner/CEO usually works.
I think it’s abnormal but I must say I had the same experience with a dermatologist that we used to visit. Every visit took HOURS of waiting. The atmosphere in the waiting room was terrible because everyone there was so pissed off, and this happened every time.