There is a waiting room for patients where the patient waits patiently. When his turn comes, the patient is asked to move from the waiting room to one of examination/consultation rooms where he waits until the doctor comes in. (Yeah, reminds me of the Seinfeld joke)
Why do doctors have more than one consulting/examining room? Why doesn’t the doctor sit in one room and have the patients come in one at a time in that room? Having more than one room obviously must involve the cost of multiple overheads. Rather than have one room with all examining facilities, and examine/consult all patients there, why do doctors prefer to move from room to room. This would help in them reducing costs for the doctor and also allow the patients to wait in the waiting room area where there are magazines etc to read, and see the doctor when he is really ready instead of sitting in the consulting room doing nothing until the doctor is ready to see him.
You may argue with this, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a way to keep you there longer. And why do that? So that 1) you feel you have spent half the day at the doctor’s office and 2) you don’t resent spending all that money for it. If you were in and out in the 10 minutes it actually took, in a fully efficient schedule, you’d say “What? All that money for 10 minutes? Why that’s x $ per hour!”
Look at it from the doctor’s perspective. Whose time is more valuable, the patient’s or the doctor’s? What doctor is going to want to sit there waiting for patients to come into the examining room, wasting 5 or even 10 minutes while they take off their clothes and hop up on the chair?
The doctor wants to control their own schedule. From the doctor’s perspective making the patient wait 30 minutes is vastly better than making the doctor wait 5 minutes. Also with multiple examining rooms the doctor doesn’t have to waste as much patient time…the doctor can examine a patient and start his next exam in the next room right away without waiting for the first patient to get dressed and leave the room, then the next patient comes in the room and gets undressed.
The multiple room schedule maximizes the doctor’s efficiency. Maybe not total efficiency for everyone, but the doctor is the one setting up the office.
While the above explanation is interesting, I think part of it has to with (a) there’s usually a nurse or tech that comes in first to take vital signs etc. and (b) you need a few minutes to undress (before) and dress (after) you see the doc.
So with the multiple exam room method, you’ve got patient A seeing the nurse in room 1; patient B undressing in room 2; patient C seeing the doc in room 3; and
patient D dressing in room 4.
Without that setup, the doc is going to be doing a lot of waiting.
So that a nurse can come in to ask you to drop your shorts while the doctor goes off to the next patient. I think the main problem is that there is less a nurse is allowed to do than makes this cutting down on actual doctor time very noticable.
I don’t know what happens when you go to the doctor. When I have been to see the doctor I go into the examination room and a nurse does some vital sign checking, temp. blood pressure etc. Then the doctor comes in a little later. I presume, but have not checked, that he was actually seeing other patients while the nurse was dealing with me.
O wonder if maybe overheads aren’t of the greatest consideration, if costs are being largely covered by insurance? In a health system which is far more aware of some priorities, I’ve never waited around that long for a doctor, and certainly never in a private room. However, most doctors I can think of have had a separate adjoining room suitable for major examinations etc., which I presume allows it to be prepared/cleaned by nurses/cleaners/whoever while other more routine work is done in the main room.
If a clinic has three rooms and one doc, the doc can be running at close to 100% of their time face-to-face with patients. While room 1 is undressing and getting vitals taken, room 2 is with the doc, and room 3 is getting dressed. Then the doc moves to room 1. Room 2 gets dressed and leaves, room 3 gets a new patient to undress and take vitals. And so on. If they had one room, the doc could only see one-third as many patients per day, while they waited for patients to get dressed and leave, the room to be cleaned, a new patient brought in, vitals taken and undressed.
**gazpacho ** - I can confirm that my doc sees other patients while I’m cooling my heels in a room, thumbing through that four-month old copy of Time. He’s got a loud and distinctive voice that carries through the walls.
Don’t forget that the rooms have to be cleaned after every patient and then
“prepped” for the next patient. Could be as little as changing the paper on the exam table to wiping everything down and then laying out some items that the doc will need for the next patient.
If we all had to wait for that to happen, it’d take alot longer too.
With multiple exam rooms, it’s easier to continue seeing patients in a timely manner. This is due to the fact that the rooms have to be tidied up after each patient. Example: if a GP has a cranky baby with an ear infection in one room, and a woman in for her pap smear in another room, with other patients waiting to be seen, he can still get his next appointment into an exam room while the pap smear exam room is being tidied.
In my ideal practice setting, I’d have 3 exam rooms, and flow endlessly between them, charting and dictating in the room in front of the patient. When I had setups like that, I could efficiently AND effectively see a LOT of patients. Of course, I had my own RN AND Medical Assistant to ensure proper movement and order execution.
Now I have one exam room which doubles as my office. It’s a struggle to see a third of the patients in this set-up compared to my ideal setting. But heck, now I work for the gummint, and the operating philosophy seems to be that my patients don’t have any place better to be anyway.
That’s the precise word that was bouncing through my head, as well. You beat me to it.
I’m not so sure that it is simply self-importance on the part of the doctor. No matter what scheme is used, the doctor can only physically be with one patient at a time. If the doctor is forced to sit around waiting on something, that slows the process down for everybody, not just him.
Once a patient enters the office and checks in at the front desk, any time that the doctor sits around also adds to the patient’s wait time - whether it be out front or in a small room in the back.
They could schedule appointments less tightly to accomodate an inefficient system, but that wouldn’t really help anybody either. It would be harder to get an appointment (since there would be fewer of them to go around), and the doctor would see (and thus get paid for) fewer patients per day.
Exactly. IANAN, but I work with physicians in helping to see patients who are also participating in medical research, and deal with issues of “patient flow” constantly. If you had only one exam room, what happens if you’ve got a patient in there who mentions being seen by another doctor for a particular medical issue but can’t accurately describe the problem/can’t recall what important medication the doctor put him on/etc. (Happens all the time. I recently had a patient who couldn’t recall what heart ailment he’d been diagnosed with 3 months ago, and the name of the procedure they’d done to him.) So while the doctor who’s seeing the patient today has to call up the other doctor, hope there’s someone at the office who’ll be able to pull the chart and find same said other doctor in a timely fashion, ask about what is going on with the patient, etc., that means that no one’s being seen and everyone is waiting around needlessly. With multiple exam rooms, the doctor can get a secretary to call the other doctor’s office, relay the message, and transfer in the call when the information is found - and while all this is going on, he can see another patient.
To many people, it sounds like it’s for the doctor’s convenience, but really, it’s for the patients’ convenience too - this is the most efficient way to handle multiple patients, and the delays involved would be so much greater without more than one exam room.
Sometimes it’s nice to have a place to put the person that is hacking up lung oysters rather than have him out there sitting next to the pregnant mom and the cub scout with a sprained ankle.
But, for the most part, I agree that it is about throughput. I work in a hospital that has several clinics. The docs complete one exam, review the chart for the next patient, go in and treat him, annotate the record, and repeat.
Oftentimes, getting a patient into a room and ready for examination takes a few minutes, especially when working with elderly or ortho patients. These folks don’t get along too quickly. Having them ready and waiting does speed the process along a little.
And I always take a magazine from the waiting room with me when I go into the exam room. Either that, or I pick up the paper before I get there.
It helps to keep faces and diseases together for one thing. Think about sitting in one place and watching a line of people pass. Could you remember who was wearing the green boots or the yellow dress? Who had the mole on his nose, or the burn on his butt? If you see them each in their own environment, they’re easier to keep straight.
It also keeps infecious diseases from spreading. Put patient in little room. Doctor visits. Sent patient away. Wipe down, and re-cover the exam table. Rinse, repeat.
It also makes patients feel like their illness is important to the medical staff.
I know one Ob/Gyn who has their private practice set up that way, specifically to avoid patient distress.
It allows the lady who has just learned that her baby has died, or who has learned she can never become pregnant, to sit and cry in private, without being hurried out to make room for the next patient. At the same time the doc can continue seeing other people and the whole clinic doesn’t grind to a halt.
In all me experience, when it your turn the doctor calls out your name and you go into the room. When doc has finished with you, you leave and he calls out the next persons name.
The funniest thing I ever encountered was an ENT Specialist who had an entire floor of a building devoted to his own practice. There were FIVE consulting rooms, plus other rooms for Audio testing etc. I saw a nurse in one room…went off for a hearing test…came back to another room for the results…then went into yet another for the doc to confirm the results and give me his verdict.
It gives the doctor time to consult the Ouija board and webMD.com to diagnose your illness. After that, he/she has to decide if you need a lot of pills, an enormous amount of pills, or an entire pill factory of pills.
