This may sound dumb, and people may want to explain why it is as it is, but it nails me pretty much every time, and always makes me mad.
Tomorrow’s morning appointment in a large city medical center an hour’s drive away just got moved 30 minutes earlier. What they said, in the forms they faxed me, was “Please arrive 30 minutes early for your appointment”. But what it actually means is that they are moving my appointment time, in the difficult direction, and consider me obligated to make the change without any discussion.
An appointment is “an arrangement for a meeting”, and to appoint a time for the meeting is “to fix or set officially”. When we talked, we fixed or set officially a time for me to be there. An appointment isn’t the arrangement for the most important part of a meeting, or for the part of the meeting that their office is reserving the doctor’s time. If they want me there 30 minutes before some part of the activities they are planning, that’s a scheduling consideration entirely inside their office, of which I have no information. Perhaps they need to schedule me to do several things, and appoint with me a starting time, and set up other details in their internal schedule.
Somehow, half the time I set something up with medical offices, I forget they will often give me a time that is for one of the internal steps in their procedures, and tell me it is the appointed time for our meetings, and I will plan around it, and then hear (after 4:00 on the day before) that their expectation is that we have actually appointed a time half an hour earlier that I’m somehow committed to making.
Yes, yes, I know somebody wants me to fill out forms or something. But they’re the ones who know that in advance. Why do they tell me a time half an hour later than they assume I will be available?
OH, thank you! That pisses me off, too! If you want me to be there at 3:30, tell me to be there at 3:30. If the doctor is going to see me at 4:00, that’s HIS appointment. MY appointment, to fill out forms, is at 3:30.
Because of the screeching whining they will get when the doctor actually meets with the patient at 4:10, and the patient gets all belligerent about the appointment “being at 3:30.”
True, they could get all detailed about “Come in at 3:30. The doctor will see you at 4:00.” But most people realize pretty quickly that medical appointments, particularly with a new provider, usually require paperwork at the beginning.
But I totally understand the medical receptionist not wanting to deal with the screeching whining mentioned above, when she can’t actually control the doctor’s punctuality.
In her place I would rather deal with getting the paperwork in a rush/ late/ afterward from patients who don’t allow the whole 30 minutes. Plus, IME, if you have your act together it doesn’t usually take 30 minutes and I don’t get any flack if I allow 10 minutes and get the paperwork done. The 30 minutes is often for the person who has apparently never seen medical paperwork before, didn’t think their insurance information would be required, has to call home to find out what medications they are on, etc. If you are the kind of person who is never late for anything, you may be overthinking this.
Now, if they stuck an extra “stop by the lab to get bloodwork before you come in” on there, I’d be mad, too
My medical scheduling pet peeve is when they try to set up a follow up automatically for a year in advance. Yeah, right, like I have any idea if that will be a good time to get an eye exam.
I’m composing this post with the assumption that this is your first visit to said doctor?
So, let’s assume a patient sees a particular doctor a dozen times over the course of their relationship. The first time, they show up half an hour early (I usually show up 10 minutes early, but I’m pretty quick with filling out paperwork), and the other 11 times, they show up at the appointed time. Now, since the admin gal is going to be scheduling dozens of patients a day, ninety percent plus of whom have seen their doctor before, it is much, much easier for her to tell the relatively rare new patient to show up 30 minutes early than it is for them to go through the rigmarole Harriet the Spry speaks of.
The only time I arrive early is if I know that I’ll have to do paperwork. I know my doctor well enough by now that if the appointment is at 4:00 it will be 4:30 at least before I see him.
And no, cooling my heals in the examination room at 4:10 does not count. At least he leaves reading material in the examination rooms.
I had an appointment last week, for a routine female-type checkup. Not critical, but you really don’t want to skip those. There have been a few recent threads which attest to that.
After I got up hecka early on my day off to get there at 8:45 am, and then waited AN HOUR AND A HALF without being called, I finally did bail. I can only take so much waiting room.
I don’t see how, even with the somewhat irregular time length required for exams of various types, they cannot estimate the actual time of my meeting with the doctor to within an hour and a half.
Usually, with the type of doctors that perform female-type exams, this is due to a baby getting itself born. Which is difficult to schedule and sometimes difficult to know when it will be done. Not that the office shouldn’t have kept you appraised of that.
I recently had some appointment time confusion with a doctor, but it was somewhat understandable as it was an appointment for a colonoscopy at the hospital (not a visit to the doctor’s office).
I got a faxed information sheet that says my appointment is at 11am. But I need to check in by one hour before that. It says that I should allow four hours for the procedure. So should I tell my ride to pick me up at 2pm or 3pm? I had to phone the hospital to check - the poor girl answering the phones probably gets asked that question about fifty times per day.
The pre-procedure stuff all took about an hour (signing in, changing, starting an IV, filling out consent forms, etc, etc), so that was accurate. But, needless to say, my actual procedure wasn’t actually started by 11am - more like noon. But I was still finished and ready to go home by 2pm.
So why the whole rigamarole about what time I need to be there vs. what “time” the appointment is? As long as I know when to arrive and roughly when I’ll be leaving, I really don’t care when each step occurs.
I work in an ophthalmology department. For the exams done by the doctors that I work with, you need to have your eyes dilated with drops. Dilation takes about 20 minutes for full effect, though this does vary by patient. So sometimes you’ll be seen by me or a tech, asked some medical questions, given a vision exam, then the drops go in. So I wish our patients wouldn’t complain about not having seen the doctor yet when it’s, say, a half hour or so after their appointment time and they came in at that time and were seen pretty promptly. I explained dilation to you. I spent time with you asking questions and such. If the doctor saw you now, they probably wouldn’t be able to see all the way back in the eye.
I can see Napier’s point. I try to schedule doctors appointments for after work whenever I can, which means there’s a limit to how early I can get there. If I schedule an appointment for 6:00 that’s because I think it will take me nearly an hour to get there from work. If you call me after I’ve set up the appointmentand tell me I have to be there 30 minutes early, that means I have to leave work half an hour early to get there when you want me there. If I’d known I had to be there half an hour before the appointment, I would have asked for one at 6:30 or later.
If it’s for paperwork, as opposed to something like dilating your eyes, sometimes they will send the forms out in advance. If you’re on a tight schedule you might want to try that.
Not always. My GYN doesn’t practice obstetrics anymore because of the malpractice insurance expense, and this is more and more common. Even when she was also an OB, her office called me to cancel if she had to go deliver a baby.
For some people, a 2:00 appointment seem to mean “realize at 1:55 that you need to be at your appointment, so jump in your car and drive across town.” This may not be true of you, but it’s true of a good proportion of people. They show up for a 2:00 10 minutes late, either delaying those scheduled later or becoming indignant that the doctor has gone in with the 2:15.
More benignly, you may be a whiz at handing over your insurance card, but there may be a line at reception that would delay your 2:00 if you showed up right at 2:00. If you’re not sure why they want you there early, call and ask.
It’s been many years since I accessed VA health care in Los Angeles, but when last I did, there were only two appointment times: 8AM and 1PM. ALL appointments for the morning were for 8AM, the afternoon, 1PM.
Obviously, some people would end up waiting for hours, yet if you didn’t show up at the appointed time, you lost your place in the list.
It was designed to maximize doctors’ time at the expense of patients’. Doctors knew absolutely that there would be no delays in seeing the next patient.
Very efficient in one way; very wasteful in another. But who is more important to the system? Doctors or patients? I guess the answer is doctors.
They are often labyrinth type places and the parking arrangements are sometimes more than just a little confusing. Keep in mind old people are more likely to be headed to medical facilities than the young. Things like 3 buildings with 6 floors each, several parking lots and entrances are often confusing for them. Even for people not familiar, it can be daunting to find your way, at times.
So they are aiming at the lowest common denominator with these directives. If you’ve been there before, know where to park and go, have already completed your paperwork on your first visit, and are aware no eye drops etc will be required, shave some of that time off.
But you do know about Murphy’s law, right? The day you shave that time down is the day your car gets a flat on the way. Or you get into the wrong elevator, having come in a different entrance, and find yourself completely lost, taking 10 mins to find your way back to where you were headed.
I guess I’m saying that this wouldn’t annoy me unless I was spending 4+ days a week at some doctors office. I’m more willing to accept that micromanagement of the doctors office workings is best left to people actually working there. Second guessing it, based solely on my totally subjective view seems disingenuous somehow.
I basically ignore that “30 minutes early” thing. They say it’s so you can fill out paperwork, but that only takes like 5 minutes, tops. I’ll show up maybe ten minutes early. When I’m bringing kids, it’s prtty easy to get dragged off schedule and I’ve even shown up like 5 minutes late. I’ve never been turned back for not being 30 minutes early. I haven’t even been turned back for being a few minutes late.
The goal of the doctor’s office is to have a patients stacked up, ready to go, so the doctor never has any down time. If the Doc is standing around, nobody is making any money. The whole doctor’s office experience is built around that idea - the long wait in the waiting room, then, just when you’ve had enough, another wait in the exam room with maybe some simple tests by the staff to fill up time.
I’ve spent some time in doctor’s offices. Long ago I made a rule and I explain it in offices where the doc is habitually late. I will only wait for one hour maximum, from the time I arrive until the time the doc is actually waiting upon me. After an hour I will leave, if I can, but in no case will I pay for the visit, even if they go to collections. Sometimes they suddenly remember that the doc isn’t actually in the house and they don’t know when he will be in. They always give the same lame explanation about emergencies and operations, like nobody can figure out how to build some extra slack in a schedule.
To be fair, a lot of people are late which can screw up a schedule, so a little padding is justified. But I’ve never seen anyone who could be as late as a doctor in his own office.
I feel a similar way to shiftless. My time is important, too. I don’t currently see any doctors other than my dentist who have after-work hours, so I am either taking time off from work or adjusting my lunch hour. There have been many times when I’ve wanted to ask for the equivalent of my hourly pay because I have been waiting for longer than I consider reasonable (and I’m plenty generous with that estimation).
What I hate is when I am in pain with something that truly needs medical attention, as opposed to a routine exam. If I get fed up and leave, well, maybe the office loses money on me, but I still have the medical problem which prompted my making an appointment.
So should I tell my ride to pick me up at 2pm or 3pm? I had to phone the hospital to check - the poor girl answering the phones probably gets asked that question about fifty times per day.