Reading the comments in this thread just indicates to me that we need more doctors. The supply of doctors is definitely artificially restricted
For real. At least in the US medical school is incredibly expensive (on top of undergrad being really expensive too). Going to school is a huge risk, because if you find you can’t handle it half way through, you’ve got all that debt,without the job to actually pay it. We’ve got so many incredible potential doctors and nurses that just can’t afford to go to school
It also takes 2x longer than most of the world to get licensed.
We need to pressure schools to open more seats.
Yep, that AMA is proof the licensing organization shouldn’t also be the union.
I have a few doctors like this.
One in particular, you have to schedule your whole day for the appointment. Even if it’s virtual.
There’s the call for the copay, the call for the vitals, the call with the midlevel, then the call with the doctor. I’ve waited over 5 hours just for the doctor before.
My next appointment with that doctor is after business hours. I am not looking forward to that late night.
Why would you stay with that doctor? Switch
I would, but the only other doctor available who treats my condition in my area won’t see me because I already saw the first doctor.
Oh that really sucks :(
Definitely :(
I had this discussion recently and my friend pointed out that this also happens with utility workers on in-house visits, I guess cause of the demand there is on their work. At least where I live.
But I can’t take it with doctors man. Also it’s the only business where you can pay to get insulted or diminished, yet not diagnosed, repeatedly from different specialists (true story)
I had appendicitis for 18 months.
I’m not going to kill that doctor. But he is 45 years older than me and some fresh graves just scream out to be pissed on.
Highfalutin fuck with his own practice and a fireplace in the lobby couldn’t diagnose and treat what a chick in her 20s with a nose ring working the night shift at Halifax caught in an hour.
I’m not going to kill that doctor. I ain’t gonna go looking for him. If I encounter him again and he isn’t cold in his urn, I’m gonna hurt him in a way medical science can’t fix.
What?
One night, I was about 20 years old or so, I woke up in severe abdominal pain. Very nausea, such vomiting. Couldn’t stand up right. Go to the hospital, given Maalox. Throw up the Maalox. Given…something else that put me out cold.
This happened over and over again for a year and a half, once or twice a month. Went to the doctor about it, “there’s nothing we can do.”
I go off to university out of state. It happens there. Young night shift doctor has the bright idea to put me in a CT machine while it hurts. Can you say “2 AM appendectomy?” Never had another one of those bouts of pain and puking again.
I apparently had appendicitis for 18 months.
And I’m not going to be a very nice person to the doctor that repeatedly didn’t do anything about it.
Because every patient before you was 10-30 minutes late for their appointment so now you have to wait an hour.
Once I had to wait more than 30 minutes even though I was the very first patient in the morning.
Or, more likely in my experience, the doctors office is overbooked and anything more than 10-15 min/patient puts the whole schedule behind.
Not really overbooked, so much as you put down you had a sore throat which takes about 10-15 minutes but now you’re here can you have your ear looked at and also your stomach hurts but it started about six years ago and you think you might have ADHD so could you get a referral for an evaluation?
And it’s like that every other patient.
I’d argue that if that’s consistently happening, you’re overbooked. If you book more people than you can reasonably expect to serve on time, that’s being overbooked.
I see that as no different as the shitty companies that have an IBR that repeatedly tells you about ‘higher than normal call volume’ no matter when you call and anytime you call for months/years. At some point you know your normal and aren’t staffing or booking at proper levels.
I work for a psych clinic where the head doctor rarely turns down same-day appointments, while his schedule is fully-booked to see multiple patients/15-20 mins. We’ve slowly bled providers over the course of the last 3 years and haven’t really replaced any of them. Turns out, it’s hard to hire when you have a reputation for low salaries and nefarious contract negotiations.
Each specialty may have their own story, but we definitely see constant issues of being overbooked AND understaffed.
Medical care suffers from the same thing all heavily-regulated quasi-markets suffer from: severely restricted supply.
This results in:
- Insufficient competition
- High prices
- Low quality work
- Low quality customer service
- Low availability and hence queueing
People complain that medicine should not be a free market, and look how bad the free market screwed up American medicine but we do not have a free market in medicine.
If we did have a free market, supply would be allowed to organically grow to match demand, introducing competition and solving all of the above problems.
But we artificially suppress supply of medicine and medical services. We call it regulation, and sure maybe it’s got its reasons for existing, but the natural and predictable result of such heavy-handed regulation is a lack of supply, leading to a lack of competition, leading to a lack of quality.
If we did have a free market, supply would be allowed to organically grow to match demand, introducing competition and solving all of the above problems.
No, health care companies would just be more “free” to make choices that cause people to die because it is more profitable.
Full stop that is the only real difference you would see.
Last time i was a the doctors office, my appointment was at 11. At 11:45 i was still waiting and i heard them laugh in the break room 😑…
My favorite was my psychologist who knows I’m autistic and routine and schedule is everything to me. Then doesn’t show up for 30 minutes and then call me saying their previous appointment went on longer than expected… this happened almost every other appointment. Eventually i quit because it gave me more anxiety and stress than the trauma’s i was dealing with. 🤦🏻
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Not to mention people would arrive at their 10 minute appointment with a list of 5 completely separate medical issues that they’d been saving up for months. So either you do a full history, examination, diagnosis and treatment plan +/- prescription in 2 minutes for each problem, or the 10 minute appointment just becomes a 20 minute appointment. And then you document everything in your lunch break or after you’re supposed to have gone home 🙃
Here in the US, the last time I went to a doctor’s office they had signs posted saying that those under free healthcare could only discuss a single issue per billed visit. Which sure, saves the medical staff a ton of time and scheduling problems, but also means the most vulnerable (and least able to take time off to visit the doctor) have to prioritize health issues and let minor ones go untreated/undiagnosed until they become major ones.
Healthcare is a mess.
How do you even know what a single issue is?
How the heck are you supposed to know if your abdomen hurting, and shitting blood are related? Is the itching related? How about the Hives, or the headaches?
Apparently you’re the doctor now.
And what about the doctors who are half an hour late for the very first appointment of the day. How is that possible?
If they’re on call it might just be they just finished working on 4 am in the morning due to some emergency. Anything is possible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In A+E, I get it. But a local GP surgery where you HAVE to have an appointment? I’m not buying it.
Uhm, if 6 patients were 10 minutes late each, you’d be 10 minutes late total.
It actually really fucks you up. You end up rereading charts and notes because your wires keep getting crossed.
Hey he’s a doctor not a mathtor
Yeth, mathtor
Whath ith thy bidding?
I’d see about a discount for those on time, reward the desired behavior.
10 minute appointment
5 completely separate medical issues
Something, somewhere, isn’t working in public health.
Yes public funded health care has many issues, congratulations on being so astute. Where I live you can book longer appointments if you need them, you just have to actually ask for the extra time. People often have let small issues add up before getting them sorted because procrastination, small issues that most people with private healthcare systems could not afford to go to the doctor to have checked out.
Most important of all, when someone feels ill they don’t have to factor a medical bill into the equation when deciding whether or no they should go to the hospital or possibly fucking die.
I’m in favour of publicly funded healthcare. My family is still with me thanks to the NHS. The problems that exist within it are because of privatisation and neglect by government across ALL areas. If my elderly parents have to fit 6 months worth of bodily problems into a 10 minute consultation with someone who has no accountability then I’m gonna get a bit upset. If you work in the NHS then thanks but more importantly if you work in government then get fucking real about what everyone needs.
I can only speak from my experience with the Canadian healthcare system. Getting a family doctor is a huge struggle right now but if you have one you can book as many appointments as you want for free. (and there are always walk-in clinics which are also free)
The best way to fix this is to cancel the appointment if they make you wait. If enough people did this the clinic loses money which should cause change. Unfortunately, patients are largely a captive clientele, having already waited months and canceled work and with few if any alternative providers.
The next best thing is much more realistic. Plaster the internet with reviews complaining of the wait. If your doctor (or more likely your doctor’s employer) does not respect your time, let everyone know.
Many of the other comments are also correct. I have worked in clinics in government, military, academic centers, venture capital, physician owned, and even free community health centers, all in the USA. Doctors running late is going to happen. I’ve kept patients waiting while in the operating room, while telling someone they have cancer or are losing a limb, and by my burnt out underpaid government scheduler incompetently overbooking. I will also tell you that when I have at least a little control over my own schedule, I’ve never made a patient wait an hour, even with the above happening. It can be done, it just isn’t because for decades timeliness has not been a financial incentive.
Make it one. Name and shame on google, yelp, zoc doc, wherever. Do it gracefully and sensitively, recognizing that there is a high chance the delay is not the doctor or nurse’s fault. Done right, you’ll do them a favor when their employer feels the sting of lost patients.
Except then they send you a bill for services not rendered and act like that’s legitimate.
You need a doctor, not otherwise.
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If they do not have your SSN - and why would they? Leave that shit blank on the forms.
They can’t do much other than refuse to let you book again.
Yeah…which is hard when they’re the only doctor who treats your condition in the area
Yikes - I have not had that problem. I am rural but not that rural.
I’m sorry you have to deal with that.
Thanks, I appreciate it
I joined a private medical group that has annual fees, purely to avoid this shit. They don’t overbook. I’ve never had to wait, unless I got there early (and even then sometimes they were happy to see me early).
Man, I resonate with the meme here in the UK where it’s free to go to the doctors but HAVING TO PAY FOR IT AT THE SAME TIME?!
Airports work like this. You arrive two hours before takeoff only to find out like half an hour before takeoff that the flight is delayed because there’s no plane.
I spent 3 days in an airport because storms near Chicago caused a ripple of delays and cancelations all over the country, I was constantly being told “okay your new flight leaves in 5 hours” and I was in a city over 100 miles away from home with no transportation.
Overall I had tickets and replacement tickets for 9 flights. Honestly given some of the times we found out there was no plane, I didn’t believe we would get to board even as they were calling boarding groups.
100 miles from home
Bro, you could have walked home in that time. Benefit of restrospect.
My destination was not to home (although in reread I an see how it reads that way), it was several states away to get to basic training. Won’t be making that Great Mistake(s) again…
Well that’s fair enough then. I bloody hate flying and airports!
Agreed
My favorite was receiving a text notification at 5:30AM thar my 8AM flight was canceled. Ruined my entire vacation
Better to be stuck on the ground than to be stuck in the air in a plane that needs maintinence, or in bad weather.
I was on a lay over and was lined up ready to board and they cancelled the flight. Was told to go to customer service to find another flight. Conveniently two other flights were canceled around the same time so they were over 900 people in the customer service line. After waiting about 45 minutes in line and moving about 20 spots forward and asking multiple airline employees that had no idea what was going on. I get a text message that my flight had been rebooked to a flight that had been delayed earlier in the day and it has finally showed up but it’s leaving in 15 minutes and it’s in a different terminal. I booked it over there and made the flight. Anyway, it was a mess. Extremely unorganized, handled terribly and it was just an all around piss poor experience. Did I get compensation for the inconvenience and time wasted? Of course not. Airline are allowed to charge hundreds of dollars and fuck things up without consequences.
There is no plane because everyone on board the inbound flight died when your 737 MAX crashed because of an MCAS failure and also all the bolts fell off.
Ok but how come i have to fill out that paper every time i come in? I’ve been to the same clinic over and over. Do they just throw my information away? Is it busywork to buy them time? I know it’s a minor quibble but fucking hell
Your guesses might be right, but most likely you are talking about the questionnaires about your medical history and what’s called the “review of systems”.
In the US, medicare and most other insurances require those questions be asked every visit, however stupid that feels. Since your doctor may only get 10 minutes face to face with you, most of us will have an assistant or a paper ask those questions, so that we can say it was done but still have as much time as possible to talk about the more meaningful stuff.
Some places do it better than others. Usually, though, the form is hard to follow and photocopied to the point of total illegibility.
Thank you. That’s helpful. Of course it was insurance. At least i know who to hate.
Eh, review of systems is good practice for any non-followup encounter anyway. It’d be nice if they actually paid RNs to do an abbreviated head to toe on non-followup visits just to catch random strays.
That’s my Otolaryngologist fit to a T.
I don’t put up with it lol. If someone is 15 late for an appt, I reschedule. Black and white. No exceptions.
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I started to just leave when this happen. There are a lot of good people who follow the schedule properly, i take my business to them instead.
If it’s so carefully timed, why is it ok for them to mess up the timing? I’m a paying customer and I have shit to do, too. Maybe it’s not true in the case of doctors, but for other businesses, the only reason you’re able to have this business is because I’m here, paying money.
Maybe it’s not true in the case of doctors, but for other businesses, the only reason you’re able to have this business is because I’m here, paying money.
You hit the nail on the head there. Other businesses exist because they won your business in competition with other businesses. A doctor’s office exists because they got permission from the state to operate.
The incentive structure is different, leading to different strategies being used to stay open
In the US at least you could easily find a different doctor, unless you live in a rural area with no other doctors in it
I left two different practices because of schedule fiascos and stuck with the 3rd because they never make me wait.
Because life is unpredictable. They can’t know in advance if they’re going to have delays, so sometimes you just have to deal with it. This goes for any appointment based service.
But should the same courtesy and understanding be extended to the customer?
Yes, which is part of why they end up running late.
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But the question I ask myself everytime is : how carefully timed is it really, if everyone has to wait so much ?
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When that happens frequently, not scheduling time for it is shitty scheduling.
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but that’s the bitch of this damned money world
This isn’t a result of money. It’s a result of having insufficient medical providers and them therefore being guaranteed business no matter how much they suck at customer service.
If money were the most powerful thing in medicine, new players would enter the market given its ridiculous revenue levels, and those new players would introduce competition and suddenly medical providers would be facing a world where their flow of customers is not guaranteed, and they would have to learn to respect and be grateful for their customers.
That’s how it would work if it were actually a “money world”. But medicine doesn’t run on money. It runs on government permission to exist, and that permission is always kept below demand levels, meaning once a provider gets a spot they don’t have to worry about someone else taking it.
Because money is fickle. To get money to come your way you need to provide good service consistently. If you stop, the money stops coming.
But a government license to operate is not fickle. Nobody can take that from you merely by offering better service. A government license to operate, in a market with severely limited supply, is a license to treat your customers like shit and see them crawling back for more.
It runs on government permission to exist, and that permission is always kept below demand levels
This is the first I’ve ever heard of this. Got anywhere I can read more about it? Sounds uncompetitive if not outright corrupt.
Them making you wait is also often a consequence of earlier patients showing up late or an appointment requiring more time than expected.
The options to solve it are less patients per day, but that leads to even longer delays before you even get to your appointment date, OR more professional staff in the office…but that would cut into profits of the people in charge so is immediately off the table in this damned money world.
In an ER, that’s understandable, but in a general doctor’s office there’s no reason that Docs should extend one patient’s appointment time just because they ended up late:
“Oh, you scheduled a 30 minute consultation because of a sore knee but now you’re asking for an ENT referral and blood work? You’ll have to schedule another appointment to go over that, we’re only covering what you told us the other day.”
You think someone should be penalised by having their diabetes review cut short because the traffic from their minimum wage job was unexpectedly slow?
Hyperbolic, made up scenario, but yeah pretty much. You get the time slot you scheduled and you should be held responsible for using it. Most offices ask you to check in at least a half hour early for a reason.
I could just as easily switch that around and ask if you believe some poor guy who finally got an extended lunch break from his minimum wage warehouse job should be fired because he had to wait an hour at the doctor’s office because some rich white lady spent 30 minutes past her appointment arguing about essential oils. Painting is pretty easy when it’s all black and white.
That sounds like an employment rights issue. Here we get as much time as required for health appointments.
OK cool don’t care and that didn’t even address half of my comment
Half an hour early? That feels excessive. At my GPs it’s 10 minutes early
Hyperbole indeed.
What about the 25 other patients who do not have a really, really important diabetes consultation, but a head cold or are just alone and need to talk?*
What about that one person who had their really, really important diabetes consultation at 6pm but was told to come back another day two hours later at 8pm once the other appointments were all stretched out ad infinitum, but can’t return anytime soon due to their boss not giving them any time off in their minimum wage job, who then DIES of diabetes? Come on, let’s not resort to hyperbole and made up scenarios - improvements are possible, and we should aim for those.
*Loneliness, in particular in elderly patients, is a real problem which I’m not trying to downplay. This needs to be solved, too.
It’s a hypothetical scenario. Penalising people for being late or for missing appointments has a higher adverse effect for people in poverty or with disabilities without actually addressing the cause. It’s why doctors in the UK are generally against introducing fines for missed appointments.
We need more capacity, yes.
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If the commenter you’re responding to is from the US then no. We have privately owned for profit hospitals and often they’re the only option in ones area.
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People always get called out for assuming everything is about the US but Europeans do it just as much lol
Quite a few doctor’s offices are owned or ran by a management group, partly to share or reduce their costs due to bureaucratic insurance companies and HIPAA compliance. Those same management groups use the doctors like a cash cow and attempt to shovel as many patients at them as they can because a venture fund is running the group behind the scenes.
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That’s a funny name for an urgent care place, from the english “drop in appointment.”
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I hear you, I just thought it was a funny name from my American perspective. Du lutger dritgodt.
You mean the municipality, which you also are a part of, and pay tax to?
There aren’t very many hospitals or medical facilities owned by municipalities anymore. Most are either owned and operated by a private hospital network, or operate under a private trust.
The hospital I work at used to be owned by the state via the university, but our governor literally gave the campus away to a private trust that operates for profit. Super fun times.
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Doctors offices are. Hospitals are funded by thr government. Either way paid for by your tax.
I think we may be talking about two different countries…
Unless you are American? Things are fucked there
Ahh, yep. Definitely different countries.
The last time I took my daughter to the doctor’s, we had the 8:30am appointment. First of the day.
I was feeling pretty optimistic that we would be in and out by 8:45.
So we arrive at 8:20 and take our seats in the waiting room. 8:30 rolls around, no call. 8:40, no call. 8:50 no call. At 8:55 a side door opens and 8 doctors stroll out with coffees in hand and make their way to their individual consulting rooms.
At 9:10 we got the call to go in.
I get that they might need to have a morning meeting to get setup for the day, but 8 doctors each wasting 40 minutes, and the entire appointment book playing catch-up for the rest of the day, seems like a colossal piss take.
Why not, like, have your meeting earlier…?
Dickheads. My grandpa was right back in the 90s when he said the country is going to the dogs. A Tory! In a way I’m glad for him that he isn’t around to see how badly his descendants are getting rinsed.
Went to my appointment Friday, was told my primary stopped working Fridays 2 months ago. They were the one who scheduled the appointment 3 months ago
