The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume LXIII

The Waiting Room

The Waiting Room

You have been there. You know how it works. You sign in for your doctor and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait.

And once you have waited long enough to lose your mind to certifiable insanity, possibly inflicting harm on a magazine or other inanimate object to release your frustration, they call your name.

And the wait is over.

But why do we have waiting rooms in the first place?

Because people need to wait somewhere.

Since the Covid era began we have seen a fundamental shift in waiting room design. Chairs are more spaced out. That's about it. That's your fundamental shift. Oh, and stay six feet apart. And wear a mask and use that sanitizing gel they make readily available to clean your hands. All healthy, common-sense stuff, but if there were no waiting room, you wouldn't need all that. You could just show up for your appointment and be seen.

A group of Seattle doctors once paid a visit to Toyota in Japan. They had heard good things about how Toyota had gotten rid of waste and improved efficiency along its assembly lines. And they wondered if some of those business principles might work in American health care. The Sensei they met with disapproved of the waiting rooms they presented in their hospital floor plan and asked if they were not ashamed to make people wait.

They were.

When you think about it, the Sensei is right. Why wait for an appointment you show up on time for? Why not just be able to say, "Here I am," and go straight to an exam room? Sure, stuff happens. Emergency situations pull resources and people in multiple directions, but in most simple, private practices, emergencies don't happen. Waiting is the result of poor scheduling. How processes don't get streamlined is highly debatable.

One thing most everyone will agree with the Sensei on is that waiting is lousy. But the reason we have waiting rooms built into our medical care system is because it generates revenue for the designers and furniture manufacturers. Big Design is behind the whole thing. I refer to Big Design as a concept here, rather than a specific organization. Search the internet for Big Design and you will find several companies using this name.

The polar opposite of what the Sensei admonishes is touted as a unique vision for the hospitals by Big Design. Waiting room innovators sell their lobby concepts as cutting-edge sanctuaries that are necessary to instill patients with a sense of calm and tranquility. In addition to being eye-catching comfort zones, other vendors will step in to make sure there are TV sets and Wi-Fi available to keep people entertained so they can see more advertising. To make it easier on medical staff, patients can check themselves in with a touchscreen device costing hundreds, if not thousands more than a pencil and sheet of paper, or their own phone.

For the sales staff behind it, this is a dream come true. Thousands of hospitals and medical facilities in need of upgrades! So much to sell! But for everyone else, maybe not so much. The point everyone seems to miss and not talk about is this -

The Waiting Room is designed to kill you.

That's right. If the last place you visit on your terrestrial journey is a medical Waiting Room, mission accomplished. Not yours - the Waiting Rooms'.

No matter how many precautions are taken, Waiting Rooms are filthy dens of contagion. Even with constant air flow venting through purification systems, once the first patient of the day arrives, everything that was cleaned up from yesterday by the overnight janitorial staff, is now contaminated. Thanks, early riser.

The first one in the door brings in microorganisms from their home, their car, the bus, wherever they have been. They slide their finger all over that touchscreen to check in, lean on the counter, pick up a magazine that has been festering with some other germs, and plop onto a chair to soil that, too. Then the process repeats, over and over, throughout the day.

The longer everyone lingers, the nastier it gets.

Other than waiting for your doctor, what else are you supposed to do while you are waiting?

Play on your phone? You will see a lot of this. Even though many waiting rooms maintain signage to keep phones silent or nix their use altogether, people with device addiction are not logging off and shutting down. Doctors won't mind this so much because it alleviates anxiety for those in need and helps to ruin their posture so they can sell osteopathic remedies for their aching necks.

How about watching TV? Every waiting room has at least one. It is stationed up high enough not to touch so the channel can't be changed, and the volume can't be lowered. Instead of cable or broadcast television, they are programmed with an endless loop of information, calming visual stimuli, and advertising. Ask your doctor! Even those glued to their phones will look up when a hummingbird flits across the screen or a soft voice asks a trivia question. The answer comes in a few moments. Right after this message from our sponsor! The commercials, trivia, and moments of nature are interlaced with random medical information about something that somebody like you may be experiencing right now. Any of the maladies that you thought you were free from are carefully pushed into your psyche to make you think you are dying. So be sure to get that thing you never thought you would worry about checked out as soon as you get into the exam room because you just might need medicine for that. Or surgery. Or hospice. Who knows?

According to this survey only 10% of the people in waiting rooms are actually watching TV. So, good job Big Design! Most others will be interacting with family or looking at their phones. The category I fall into is the 21% who do nothing. I am part of the one-in-five people who are there for only one reason and will absolutely do nothing else until my mission is accomplished. To see the doctor before I die. I am extremely well focused.

When I showed up for an appointment last week, they asked me to sign in on a touchscreen pad. It is the same touchscreen pad they always want me to sign in on, and it never works for me. I have no idea why. So, clinic staff hit all the buttons for me. I also have a huge problem with the touchscreen on telephones. Most of the buttons I push just don't work. People have tried to help, guiding me through, saying I am pushing too hard or too light, but the touchscreen rarely responds the way I need it to. Real buttons I have no issue with, just touchscreens.

I sat there a while after I checked in and saw that EVERY SINGLE PERSON who came in after me had the same problem. Five patients in a row besides me needed the clinic staff to complete their check-ins.

How can that be? Does it need batteries, maybe?

I don't think so. But at least I know it is not just me. So, of course, I did some research to find out what the deal is with these touchscreens. How could it be worth it for the staff to have to waste their time with this contraption, when they could just have people sign in on a piece of paper? Where is the value in self-service when you can't do it yourself?

Lo, and behold, I found out that touchscreens don't work for everyone. Turns out that if you have dry skin, callused fingers, or poor circulation, the touchscreen may not respond to your touch. So, once again, there is one more level of frustration to add to the waiting room.

To top it all off, there are the other patients. The wild cards of humanity that you have absolutely no control over. Like Forrest Gump's proverbial box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get. You may need to share the room with somebody coughing up who-knows-what, and there you are stuck breathing whatever came out of them. At least you have a mask. Or there might have been some snot-nosed youngster accompanying Mom to an appointment, who sat in your chair before you did, and slimed their filthy little hands all over the arms, and you don't even know it. Some patients didn't get the message or don't care about silencing themselves or their phones and are playing loud games or having conversations in the middle of everyone, oblivious to what anyone else hears about all of their problems. They always use the speaker option on their phones, and they shout.

I was lucky this week, to only have one obnoxious person in my vicinity. It was an old lady, likely a dementia patient between 80 and 100 years old, with a companion who listened to her travails. She had a solid monologue of about four sentences in a row that she repeated constantly. It went something like this:

"Everything is so boring. I just don't know why everything is so boring. There is nothing to do, nowhere to go. This is boring. I am bored here, aren't you bored? I just don't know what to do that isn't boring."

She maintained a repeated loop of similar phrasing, never letting up the whole time and I am certain that the word boring was in every sentence. That went on for about twenty minutes before they called me in to see the doctor. How the lady accompanying her restrained herself from committing homicidal atrocities, I can't say. But anyone who was there would make a solid witness for her defense.

All of the hurdles placed before people in waiting rooms must do something to the patients. So, when they take your blood pressure and say it is a little high, just ask them Have you spent any time checking in and sitting in your own waiting room? That's why!

If you do happen to die in the waiting room, rest assured (and forever) that your doctor will probably be paid by your insurance for the visit because you already checked in. That is why they want you to do those remote check ins. If you die without even showing up - cha-ching, baby!

Chances are, you won't actually die in a waiting room, you may just briefly wish you were already dead. But, at least you have access to health care. Many others around the world do not. Please remember that.

Thanks for reading.