Hello Clinical Laboratory, my old friend,
I’ve come to take my blood test with you again. Because my specialist wants the latest update, so I visit you every 3 months. My appointment was 48 minutes ago, and there are 16 people who arrived earlier than me, still waiting. As the clock ticks, I can hear everything but the sound of silence. Of course you are not alone, Clinical Lab; my other doctors made me wait for them as well. On average, Americans wait 19 minutes and 16 seconds to see a physician, according to Vitals’ Wait Time Report [1]. But the report forgot to add the wait time for check-in at registration and in the examination room. The funny thing about waiting in a clinical laboratory is that a majority of the patients have been fasting before a blood test. So now your patients are not just becoming impatient, but also hungry (or as young people like to call it, “hangry”) as we enter lunchtime.
You offered some reading material to help us pass the time. Many clinics present entertainments like magazines and television to improve the waiting experience [2]. I once visited a fancy clinic that provided an espresso machine for parents and a touchscreen-wall video game for their children. But I have to tell you: I have watched this Judge Judy episode four times in other clinics’ waiting rooms, and I have no desire to touch this well-thumbed Cosmopolitan magazine. Thank you, but, no thanks.
You might wonder why I care about waiting so much. Let me be honest with you: like most of your patients, I compare the waiting time with the time actually spent with the doctor [3]. As patients, if we spend 45 minutes waiting but only get 5 minutes of the doctor’s time, we won’t feel all that waiting was worth it. Certainly, I understand that a vast amount of effort was made behind the scenes. Like the story of Picasso and the bold woman, most people don’t understand that a seemingly effortless one-stroke drawing actually took a lifetime of practice to achieve [4]. I imagine that Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler would happily back me up in their book Dollars and Sense: “Assessing the level of effort that went into anything is a common shortcut we use to assess the fairness of the price we’re asked to pay” (in our case, we pay with time). To solve the problem of customers being reluctant to pay for “invisible effort,” Dan offered the solution of providing transparency [5]. For example, shipping tracking shows all the transactions in each location, and an open-kitchen restaurant shows its staff busy fulfilling food orders. Needless to say, due to medical confidentiality, you can’t have an “open clinic” that shows the staff taking blood pressures or running tests to everyone in the waiting room. But perhaps you could still give us some indication of the “behind the scenes work.” Tell me that you were reading my medical history, that you were double-checking my results, or that you were researching the latest cure. It would make me feel much better to know that you were doing all the “ground work” while I was waiting for you. And I will pretend that I didn’t see you eating bonbons and doing crossword puzzles as I walked past the doctors’ lounge.
And now, I would like to end this letter with a quote from Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”:
If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
Yours truly,
Yi-Lin
References:
- Vitals wait time report. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.vitals.com/about/wait-time
- Ahmad, B., Khairatul, K., & Farnaza, A. (2017). An assessment of patient waiting and consultation time in a primary healthcare clinic. Malaysian Family Physician : The Official Journal of the Academy of Family Physicians of Malaysia, 12(1), 14–21.
- Huang, X. (1994). Patient attitude towards waiting in an outpatient clinic and it’s applications. Health service management research. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/095148489400700101
- Airey, D. (2017, September 25). Picasso and pricing your design work. Retrieved from https://www.davidairey.com/picasso-and-pricing-your-work/
- Ariely, D., & Kreisler, J. (2017). Dollars And Sense: How We Misthink Money And How To Spend Smarter. Harper
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Author: Yi-Lin Cheng (website)
Editor: Mary Abramczuk
Image credit: Abraham Solomon, “Waiting for the Verdict” (England. 1859), The J. Paul Getty Museum, via Getty.edu