Yet again I set up “an appointment” for a medical procedure, in this case for 3:00, only to hear at the end of the conversation that they need me to arrive and check in at 2:45.
“So, the appointment is for 2:45?”
“No sir, 2:45 is when we need you to check in. The appointment is at 3:00.”
“But you need me at 2:45.”
“Yes. But the appointment, the procedure, is at 3:00.”
What we have here is a failure to communicate. If I am going to have a procedure on some sort of schedule, I need to know when to present myself, when to hand myself over to their care. We need to appoint some time for this. That is why it is called “an appointment”. Appointments are acts of having appointed something. Procedures are something else, and if they don’t happen at the same time, it is the appointment they need to be scheduling with me.
They may be planning to do some paperwork, have me change, take my blood pressure, I don’t know what else. That’s their business. They are running the show. If they are going to tell a doctor or nurse or technician to show up in the procedure room at 3:00, that’s fine, but it’s their internal mechanics in their practice. I don’t need to know that, I only need to know the appointed time at which they take over my agenda.
Instead, I figure out whether I can get there by 3:00, and we go through a bunch of details on that premise, and then they move the appointment a quarter of an hour earlier, which I may not be able to schedule.
I’m 36 years old, and every medical office I’ve ever been to since I was a small child worked that way. Arriving 15 minutes early for a doctor’s appointment is something I, and all rational human beings, understand when we set up those appointments.
Now: when your appointment is for 3:00 but you don’t get called back for another half hour, *that’s *what I thought this thread was going to be about.
The “appointment time” is when the M.D. gets involved. All of the preliminaries have to be out of the way before he or she takes his 15 minutes out of his/her busy schedule to see you.
How long it takes you to get through the preliminaries is irrelevant. The appointment time is on the doctor’s calendar, not yours.
Yup, I don’t there’s anything in the OP. Doctors don’t get involved with the paperwork, the forums to fill out, the insurance. Otherwise, they’d never have time to see patients. That’s why they have an office staff, so all that stuff is taken care of while the doctor is seeing previous appointments
From the title, I thought this was going to be a thread about doctors who give you an appointment at 3:00, then don’t see you till quarter to five. That’s a lot more aggravating than being asked to come in 15 minutes early to fill out paperwork (and I’ve generally found that request with most practices only applies to an initial appointment, not subsequent ones).
I can understand that sometimes there are extenuating circumstances, emergencies come up, etc. But with some doctors, you can plan on an hour or two in the waiting room, every time. I think that’s just overbooking and poor planning.
I’m not saying the doctor should fill out insurance forms, and I don’t care what the doctor’s calendar looks like (I can’t even see that). The issue is that the only time I need to know is when they expect me, so if we negotiate that that is 3:00 and later they tell me it’s 2:45, I think they should have said 2:45 all along.
If they expect me at some time, I’ll typically get there a few minutes early to allow for the vagaries of fate.
The appointment with the doctor is an internal matter for the hospital. You can’t just show up and expect to see the doctor at the appointed time without going through the paperwork first, so the appointment (and therefore the appointment time) for that is meaningless to the patient. There are two points in time that matter: (1) when the doctor will actually see the patient, and (2) when the patient should show up and start filling out paperwork. The one that matters to the patient is the second one. They don’t really care when the first one is, unless it will be vastly different from the second. The hospital cares about the first one, but so what? And really, there’s no guarantee on the first one being accurate depending on what cases the doctor ends up seeing that day.
So why tell patients a time they don’t have any particular reason to care about and will often be wrong anyway? If they want them there at 2:45, tell them they have an appointment for 2:45. Don’t tell them they have an appointment for 3:00.
I wish my doctors actually kept their appointments.
I understand Napier’s frustration, though. If they want you there at 2:45, then the appointment is at 2:45. Whether the doctor sees you at 3:00, 3:08, or 2:56 is an irrelevance. The appointment should commence at the time that they begin doing business with you, whatever that business might be; administrative, nursing, or consultation with a doctor.
Providing two different times to the customer simply adds a layer of confusion that isn’t merited in this case. If they have to be there at 2:45, why even mention 3:00?
I have never been confused by this. What’s so hard to figure out about, “Your appointment is at 3:00, but we’d like you to come in 15 minutes early to fill out your paperwork.”? I’m usually 20 minutes early, anyway. My appointment is when the doctor sees me, assuming he’s on time, not when I arrive in the waiting room.
As prior posts have said, the administrative person is scheduling the doctor’s time, not your time. You want to see the doctor, it’s the doctor’s schedule that is relevant. 3:00 is relevant because that’s the opening on the doctor’s schedule.
Damn it, if you are expected to show up at 2:45, that is your appointed time. What is so hard to understand about that.
OTOH, there is a doctor I see once a year, supposedly the best opthalmologist in the province (my former eye doctor sent me there with that recommendation when he was beyond his depth) whose appointment secretary tells you to expect to wait at least three hours and that is often an underestimate. Once I didn’t see him till 7:30 for a 3:00 appointment.
I asked the secretary what would happen if I came three hours late. “Then he won’t see you at all.” I have no idea why he does this.
If you’ve just spent 10 minutes mutually going through your calendar and the doctor’s calendar trying to find a time you can make, only to be then be told that you actually need to be there 15 mins earlier, then that could be frustrating yeah? Particularly if you have a busy schedule and that change of 15 mins means you can’t make it.
But the patient doesn’t care about what’s going on the doctor’s schedule. It’s an irrelevant piece of information to them and providing it just adds confusion. The admin should do the math so that the patient doesn’t have to worry about it.
What math? You don’t need a degree. And who can’t keep track of two times at once?
It’s like Cartoonacy pointed out:
“Okay, sir, your flight is scheduled for 4:10. Please be here at least an hour before–”
“So my flight is at 3:10?”
“No, sir, the flight is at 4:10, but to make sure you–”
“So which is it? Is my flight at 4:10 or 3:10?”
[QUOTE=Richard Pearse;1964930I8]
I see the issue.
If you’ve just spent 10 minutes mutually going through your calendar and the doctor’s calendar trying to find a time you can make, only to be then be told that you actually need to be there 15 mins earlier, then that could be frustrating yeah?
[/QUOTE]
That can be frustrating, no. It isn’t rocket surgery.
I just ignore all that, and arrive at 3:00. I know that they will be running behind, and I’ll wait an hour or more anyway – I just always bring a book with.
Once the clerk tried to reprimand me for not showing up 15 minutes early. So I said “Oh, is the doctor waiting for me already? I’d better get right back there.” And I went through the door and headed down the hall toward his exam room. Quite an uproar, with three of them running after me to try to drag me back to the waiting room. Then every 15 minutes after that, I went up to the clerk and asked if the doctor was ready for me yet – “I’m sure he must be waiting; because they were so worried that I didn’t show up 15 minutes early – have you gone back and checked to be sure he isn’t waiting?”
When I saw the doctor (about 1 hr 20 min later) I tpld him that I knew he was a really good doctor, and very busy, and I was quite willing to wait an hour or more to see him, like I usually did. But if his receptionist was going to bitch at me about being late, I would bitch right back about being kept waiting.
A whole bunch of things can happen on a visit to a doctor’s office, including filling out paperwork, being weighed and having other tests done by a nurse or physician’s assistant, consulting with the doctor, having tests done, and sorting out follow-up appointments and prescriptions and payment on the way out.
All of this, collectively, comprises “the appointment.” Just tell me what time i need to be there. How you arrange the stages of this appointment is the problem of the doctor’s office.
I might start a restaurant run on the principles of the doctor’s office. Your reservation is the time that your main course order will be taken. But we’ll need you to arrive fifteen minutes early for bread, drink orders, and appetizers.