It’s this.
I go in only for very routine health care (yearly checkups mostly; I’ve had one or two additional visits for colds or something else, but they’re rare) and I almost never wait. My office does ask that you come a little early for any paperwork, but I’ve never been in the waiting room for more than 5 or 10 minutes anyway. They run a tight ship, I guess.
That said, I do usually book the early morning slots. That probably has more to do with my experience than a) my office or b) my general good health, now that I think about it. And I’m never going in for anything urgent anyway; I can wait a couple of weeks for whatever to open up.
I go to a huge clinic with dozens (hundreds?) of doctors, both GPs and all kinds of specialists. It has a central records system that operates a dozen different locations. I have never waited more than 15 minutes later than my actual appointment time to see a doctor.
There’s something to be said for bureaucracy, in this case.
I had to get a specialist to check out a mole for possible cancer. I got an appointment 3 months in the future. Then I put in about 3 hours at his place. It turned out to be nothing but the time waste was ridiculous.
I had an office like that when my oldest daughter was young. Her pediatrician’s office was awful. I don’t know if it’s because it was one of the few at the time that took the state insurance (whatever Tenncare was called back then) or what but if you got an appointment at 10 a.m. chances are you’d be there until 2:00. Worse was the urgent care appointments. They told you to come in thirty minutes before they opened at eight a.m. and you knew you’d be there with your sick child all day with a chance of not even being seen. That place is closed down now.
Where we go now we are seen within minutes of our appointment time but it’s hard to get an appointment. They want you to always speak with the call-back nurse first and they’ll give me some advice instead of an appointment about 75% of the times I’ve called. Even if I’ve already tried it they want me to try it again. It’s really annoying but at least I don’t have to haul a sick kid out for ten hours hoping for treatment.
I had a doctor’s appointment several months back for 8 am, which is when the office opens, so I assumed I would be the first appointment of the day. And he still didn’t make it into the exam room until almost 9am. What really gripes me is that the nurse comes in, takes my vitals, then tells me the doctor will be in shortly, and half an hour later he still hasn’t shown up. If it’s going to be half an hour before he comes in, tell me it’s going to be half an hour!
I <3 my doctor’s office setup. I started going to him when he left a Doc-inna-Box practice to go solo, mainly because of his manner of practice [he schedules 30 minutes per patient, and always listens to what you have to say and actually knows the questions to ask to clarify things if you are not clear about what your issue is] Then his practice took off, and he added extra full doctors to the practice, not just nurse practitioners. Then he bought out a second practice near another hospital, and has a full staff there as well, and he splits his time between the 2 offices [2 days at one, 2 days at the other and 1 day seeing all the pharm salesmen so they don’t suck up the time of the practice doctors.]
I actually now see one of the sub-doctors in the practice because she has more experience with my specific issues, though my original doctor actually will pop in to say hello when I am in the office [I generally schedule my appointments for first thing Wednesday morning, his day to see salesmen]
They are also amazing at seeming to get me set up with external specialist consults - usually within 2 to 3 weeks. I got the call from the sleep apnea lab in 3 days and was snoring away in the lab in 6 days.
My doctor is always on time but she isn’t always my doctor ----- and we’ve danced a few rounds over that. She is part of a practice or 5 doctors and while you schedule for a certain one that isn’t always the one you get. For 95% of the people out there that may not be a big deal but for my conditions it doesn’t help. So if I get one of the others I usually walk out and rebook or sit and wait.
I go to a clinic that’s first come-first served. I’ve never waited more than half an hour, even when I’ve been at the back of the line when the door opened in the morning. My only complaint is that they’re scaling back their hours. The main reason I started going there was that they were open from 9 to 9, seven days a week.
Now they’ve scaled back to 9 to 7 on weekdays and 10 to 5 on weekends. So now I can’t make it after work, but if I can make it to the weekend, I still don’t have to take sick leave to visit.
We just had a $h!ty time with the medical system on Monday. My wife was having extreme pain in her abdomen and our friend who is a nurse told us to go to an Urgent Care place. Urgent my ass. We waited 45+ minutes to see someone. They said it looked like it could be a gal bladder problem and sent us to the ER, calling ahead.
I guess Mondays are extra dangerous days because the ER was full. Right after we walked in we found that they were sending ambulances away to other hospitals. It took over an hour to get to triage, and another 45 minutes to get a bed. We were right behind the guy who told them his symptoms were a runny nose and a cough. It took another six hours to do an ultrasound and CT scan.
Final diagnoses: abdominal pain. :smack: Everything looked normal so they gave her some strong painkillers and sent us home.
From my experiences I found the 4 quickest ways to get through the ER.
- Ambulance - Done
- Throw up on the desk or a nurse - Done
- Be 9 months pregnant and say your water broke
- Say your arm is numb and you are having chest pains
My last visit i was in the exam room within 10 minutes of my scheduled time. The longer wait was at the pharmacy (which is onsite), but i did have my prescription same day. I went back that Saturday to have blood drawn for a variety of tests and was in and out in less than 15 minutes. That was as a walkin.
I have a friend who is an ER doc. She says that at least 75% of the people who come to the ER are one of the following three scenarios:
-
Want a pregnancy test (which makes no sense; the hospital is going to do the same test you buy at the drugstore, and why is that an emergency?)
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Want prescription pain pills
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Are treating the ER as a pediatrician for their child’s colds
Wow, I thought the C word normally gets you an appointment, like, 15 minutes ago…or is that just if you’ve already had cancer. My mom had melanoma. Her dermatologist takes about 4-6 months to get in to, but if she calls and says she has a new mole, they’ll see her that day.
Never. I have never had any of my doctors be more than an hour late before, and that one time an emergency came up with his previous patient (the patient before me was also waiting there, I guess he was waiting for 2 hours.) Finally we knocked on the door to make sure the doctor was alright.
However, I have had the experience of trying to see a popular doctor and having to wait 2 months for an appointment.
It’s usually at least an hour wait here, but I put up with it because he is a fabulous doctor and has been my family doctor since I was born. He knows everything about me. I actually live 4 hours away now, but I still keep him as my primary physician. I’m usually just a twice a year checkup/prescription refill kind of person right now. If I needed something fast, I’d go to a walk-in clinic here. I do the same for my psychiatrist.
Ugh, this is an ugly topic to bring up, but I’ll be the one to do it. There’s a lot more doctors coming over from South Africa right now, and while I don’t doubt their medical knowledge, I do doubt efficient communication. Once I was re-routed to a foreign doctor for a prescription refill. He’d never heard of the medication (I thought that was odd, but he was new here and maybe it is known by a different name where he trained), but then he had me spell it out for him and tell him the exact dose to put on the refill.
To this day, I regret not going V-i-c-o-d…
- Show up in obvious respiratory distress. I’ve shown up at an ER and tried to wheeze out my name. Before I could do so, I was put in a treatment room and hooked up to oxygen. I got triaged and seen by a doctor in under 10 minutes, I think, and they started another treatment in another five minutes. The thing is, though, I needed that treatment immediately. It wasn’t something that I should have waited until morning to get treated. The ER staff had me treated and feeling a lot better before they even took my insurance info. They DID want my name because I’m in the hospital data system, which has a record of my allergies and such.
ERs are for EMERGENCIES, that is, things that are going to get a lot worse if you don’t get treated immediately, and possibly fatal things. A lot of people use ERs as a convenient after-hours clinic. This drives up the cost in money and in time for everyone.
I’ve gone to a doctor who clearly had either bad time management himself, or his office staff was bad at scheduling, or both. After waiting a couple of hours in the waiting room, I asked how long the backlog was, and found out that he wouldn’t be able to see me for at least another couple of hours. Since I’d already had a long wait on my first appointment, I just cancelled this second appointment and told the receptionist that I’d think about making another appointment with this guy…but that I’d probably go see another doctor. I followed this up with a letter to the doctor himself, explaining why I would not be seeing him again, but I don’t know if he ever saw it, or if the office personnel just discarded it. Never got a reply to that letter.
It’s not just South Africa. I’ve had doctors from China, from India, from all over the world. Some of them are excellent doctors, but I can’t understand them, and I doubt that they can understand me. Some of them are trained in, let’s say, non-Western medicine. Some of them seem to have received their MD as a premium from a box of Cracker Jacks. And some of them mistake their MD (or DO) as a license to tell me how to manage those portions of my life that aren’t affected by my physical health. I don’t want to be told to read my Bible daily as part of my treatment plan, especially after I’ve informed the doctor that I’m an atheist, for instance.
My endocrinologist is from India, and while he seems to be very well trained in Western allopathic medicine, I have a VERY hard time understanding him…and I’m used to the Indian accent. I have to ask him to repeat himself several times, which is frustrating and time wasting for both of us. He’s very smart and knows a lot about diabetes and other internal medicine issues, but I think that I’m going to have to look for a new specialist, because I just can’t understand him on the first go round. And one of these days, not understanding exactly what he meant might put my health at risk unnecessarily.
At my GP, the most I’ve ever had to wait was 30 minutes from the time my appointment was supposed to start to the time the Dr. walked in the door. But usually it is 15 to 20 minutes.
On the other hand, when I go to see my Ortho doc, the later in the day your appointment is, the longer you have to wait. But I found out why when I was having back issues. He sat down looked at my X-Rays and MRIs and explained what he saw. He explained my options and why he would recommend a particular treatment. He answered every single question that I or my wife asked. He offered up other questions that he typically got that we didn’t ask. Never once did he look at his watch nor make it feel like he was trying to rush us through our appointment. It made it really worth the 2 hour wait to feel like someone cares.
Yes and no. For my own personal physician, I rarely wait more than 15 minutes total. The last time I was there my butt hadn’t yet touched the seat in the waiting room when I was called in to the examining room, and the doc showed up immediately after the nurse weighed me and took my BP & temp.
However (pause and heavy sigh), when I take my mother in law to her appointments, it’s always at least 2.5 hours, and I count on 4 hours. It’s abso-bleeping-lutely amazing. For a 9:00am appointment, the patient must arrive at 8:45 (why not say 8:45?). So we arrive at 8:45 and wait from 15 - 30 minutes to be called to the receptionist’s desk, where the insurance card is viewed and a ID bracelet is put on the patient. We then return to the waiting area, where our seats have been taken by others and no other seats are to be found.
We stand around there for generally about 1 - 2 hours. We’re then called into the examining room, where the nurse does the weighing and BP check, tells us to wait (duh) and leaves. We cool our heels in the examining room for another 45 - 60 minutes, until a resident arrives. I give the resident the MIL’s history (nobody has time to read her chart), and the resident then examines and talks to us about the reason for the visit. This takes about 15 - 20 minutes, depending on the specialty. The resident then leaves, and we wait for another oh, 45 - 60 minutes, until the attending doctor arrives with the resident in tow. The resident then recaps his/her exam and discussion with the patient and the impatient daughter in law; after this the doctor does his/her own exam and discussion.
Decisions are made regarding referrals/next visit/prescriptions, we conclude the visit, and return to the waiting area. There we wait for the referral or prescription or lab orders for another 30 minutes or so.
Finally, we leave. It’s actually better to make appointments for later in the day as the staff is anxious to get things going and it seems to go faster. Although I did have to pull a fire alarm one time to alert security because they forgot about us and everyone went home and locked the exit doors.
These guys are actually good physicians, but good grief, my dogs are better at administration than they are.
When my wife went into labor with our first kid, when we got to the hospital her water had broken and she was throwing up into a bucket. They got her out of reception and into a bed where she would be someone elses problem really, really fast.