The doctor’s office when they’re an hour behind because people keep coming in late.
I’ve had appointments at opening time and they’re still half an hour late. Doctor strolling in 15 minutes after the appointment time.
That’ll be $47,000
As a Canadian I genuinely can’t tell if this is an exaggeration or not.
Depends on about a billion of different factors, but the answer could range from “yeah it’s an exaggeration” to “its actually a pretty generous estimate”
At least I don’t have to put up with that part with the NHS
Oh, you see an actual doctor? I haven’t seen an actual doctor in the last like 3 years, always just a physicians assistant or other nurse.
Still get charged the dr copay though, funny how that works.
I wouldnt be surprised if the doctor is an AI construct and theyre just running my symptoms through whatever insurance company provided AI bullshit at this point.
I love how multiple people itt are defending doctors making us wait up to an hour after our appointment time as if it’s not 90% their fault
TBF it’s usually not the doctor’s fault, it’s systemic.
Systemic as in “everyone else does this so we have to in order to compete”?
It’s always seemed to me the issue is over scheduling
Exactly. If it’s at a hospital, then the doctor has little to no say in the matter. I will always blame the bosses before the workers.
In America I have rarely gone to a hospital to see a doctor. Most of my doctor visits have been to practices with 3-5 doctors. They could choose differently. what I notice is that doctors are rich and all seem to live in very nice homes and drive fancy cars. They over schedule and waste our time because they want to maximize their profits. Not because they have to. Healthcare in America is about making money and it sucks.
I hear what you’re saying. But these are hard working people who suffered through a residency and have no personal lives. It feels like we’re being crabs in a bucket.
Three overwhelming majority of that profit is going to insurance and pharma shareholders, not to the doctors themselves. The difference between a doctor and a billionaire is about a billion dollars. Everybody ought to be living like doctors and it’s the shareholder’s fault that we aren’t.
It’s taken decades of bad experiences for me to get here. I have seen time and again that most doctors are not interested in helping people. They are interested in driving a Mercedes and retiring with millions of dollars. They aren’t billionaires but they are selfish pricks. And you can easily tell the difference between the minority of doctors who do care and the majority who don’t. The typical doctor assaults you with “you’re just another patient” vibes from the first moment you walk in the door. They don’t ask followup questions, they don’t listen to your complaints about whatever issue you’re having, they’re basically worse than a Google search.
Then sometimes you’re faced with insane billing issues like one I’m going through now from a mental health professional who came back months later after not helping me at all and being completely inept at their job to try and double bill me for all the services I already paid for. This guy sucked from day one, utterly incapable of communicating, and now he’s repeatedly blown me off when I try to straighten this out and prove I paid it. I approached him for help with stress and anxiety and literally got no help and added stress and anxiety about the fucking basics of just trying to seek help from him. I honestly suspect he’s a scammer who has pulled this double bill scam a lot. I know this area has a lot of wealthy people who would’ve assumed they made a mistake and just paid the bill of hundreds of dollars again. I could tell you several fucked up stories about how doctors wasted my time, not helping me at all, costing me a lot of money, and stressing me out.
Trust me, I’ve appreciated the great doctors I’ve seen. They are wonderful humans who clearly want to help people. It’s unmistakable and unforgettable when you get a doctor like that. I have no beef with them, and even if they made me wait a long time, I’d assume it wasn’t their fault. But I’d guess out of the doctors I’ve seen in my life, and we’re probably looking at 30-50 doctors at this point, less than 20% actually seem in the field for good reasons.
And just for clarity, I’m in the US. It’s likely that percentage is much higher in civilized countries.
So, doctors should see fewer patients? Meaning it would take longer to get the appointment in the first place, but at least you wouldn’t have to sit in the waiting room for a bit?
They should schedule realistically and not make people wait over an hour as has happened to me several times. Are you really suggesting that doctors offices don’t fuck this up royally? It’s not on me to tell them how to fix their business but it’s abundantly obvious in America that doctors can do whatever they want to you and they don’t care if they waste (a lot of) your time. Nothing about that is inevitable, at least not nearly to the degree that it happens
My mum is a nurse. From what she tells me, almost all wait times are caused by the doctors who book too many patients and appoint each patient too little of time.
Speaking from experience, we’re an hour behind because 20 people were 5 minutes late
And definitely not from the over scheduling. Yep definitely not that.
You don’t overschedule, people start complaining that too many doctors aren’t taking new patients. You try to increase the amount of doctors and people complain about immigration. Can’t win
Powerful lobbies are surpressing the number of doctors practicing in the US. If a foreign doctor wants to emigrate and practice here they cannot until they pass TOEFL (reasonable) AND finish US-based residencies, of which there are few. I know a Russian dermatologist who has been a receptionist for years because she cannot get ECFMG certification. Some states are wising up and waiving the residencies, but way more need to do it.
I’m not complaining about immigration. Only idiots and assholes complain about that.
Doctors might schedule less patients per day and increase the number of patients seen overall. It’s not like over scheduling doesn’t have other effects besides being infuriating. It means they rush through the visit, ask few follow-up questions and decrease the chance I’ll have a solution in that one visit. I may have to come back again after the useless piece of non-applicable advice they gave me doesn’t work.
I guess a lot of lemmings work in doctors offices or something. It’s not an unfair ask at all to not routinely wait many minutes past your appointment time. It’s very fair. Yet itt several users push back against this idea as though the waiting isn’t anyone’s fault. Yes, it is. And we deserve better.
As a professional patient, trust me, I know. Short, pointless appointments are the bane of my existence. But I’m rural, and someone not taking patients can mean I have to travel a couple hours to the nearest big city. It’s a giant asspain all around
I mean - it already takes months to get an appointment. If they schedule even fewer patients I don’t see that improving either.
If they schedule fewer patients then maybe they’d feel like they have time to talk to me and we’d actually solve my issue so I don’t come back two weeks later, further gumming up the system. “Even fewer”? A recent doctor experience I had was arriving early for a 9:45 appointment to an absolutely jam packed waiting room where I had to wait literally almost two hours to be seen. By your logic, they weren’t seeing many patients and it’s a bad solution to see fewer. At one point it was announced they were about an hour behind schedule. Even that was very incorrect for me, almost by a factor of 2.
I cannot pinpoint all the problems behind the scenes but it’s 100% clear multiple people are not operating honestly. If you make an appointment time, you should plan to not have patients wait hours past that. You the doctor office did something wrong and it was avoidable. They probably over scheduled and then also the doctor came in late. Again I don’t know the details but I do know they fucked up and that’s not uncommon and it’s also not something to dismiss as patients expecting too much.
There’s a huge problem with staffing and insurance bullshit in the medical field. 20 years ago, if I got sick I could see my GP usually the same day. Now it takes months to get an appointment, so people go to urgent care or the ER.
A doctor friend explained to me years ago a huge part is insurance companies. He explained that if he prescribed an MRI, he personally had to speak to an adjuster on the phone that had a literal timer requiring them to be on the phone for 20 minutes. They want to inconvenience the doctors into not prescribing procedures or medicines that cost more money.
Yeah, I agree the system is fucked up from the top down. Doctors do not deserve all the blame for sure. Mainly, I’m just likely to not be forgiving of crazy wait times if the doctor also sucks at providing care. A lot of them do suck, unfortunately. Really makes you appreciate the good ones.
My mother does two things whenever I take her to a doctor’s appointment:
- Complain to everyone if she has to wait even a few minutes for her appointment to start
- Endlessly ask the doctor pointless questions, repeat herself over and over again with the preface “and as I said”, and generally babble so her own appointment goes long past its scheduled length
I’ve had them be running late when i’m the first friggin’ appointment
Thats just the doctor getting stuck at starbucks on their way in.
Or dealing with someone’s life threatening emergency and pretending it’s people being late.
It is really funny to me that, in general, medical professionals in the US still think people do or should broadly respect them.
… Why?
Nobody cares that you’re just following orders, that’s not a very good excuse.
Nobody cares that you have a boatload of debt you need to pay off… most people do these days.
None of that gives ya’ll societal permission to engage in possibly the most elaborate gaslighting fraud system that humanity has ever produced.
Ya’ll are supposed to have ethics, ‘first, do no harm’, yet you violate this routinely as a matter of course, “professionally”.
With few exceptions, you’re all hypocritical liars with God complexes.
You should know, better than most, that your intentions do not matter at all, outcomes do.
I’d rather wait for the doctor that takes its time to diagnose everyone than the one that is always on time
Maybe the one that’s always on time is just really good at diagnosing.
“Cancer. Get out. Erectile dysfunction. Get out. Missing a leg. Get out.”
Dam I thought it was just an inner ear infection giving me balance issues.
One of the skills doctors need is to be able to not only look that the most apparent option because should they diagnose wrong the patient is in a even worse position. Medicine is not a okams razor field, getting the diagnosis right precedes getting it fast.
In US, money precedes diagnosis. Now give me $850 and try again with another doctor
How Covid didn’t end with a modern Black Plague incident in the US is beyond me.
I would rather they manage their appointments like they value everyone’s time. Not everyone has an hour to wait PAST when they say they are available.
Oh, your bureacracy is complicated?
Cool, I don’t care.
Tell how much this is gonna cost before I obtain the service.
Can’t even come close to doing that?
Fraud, as far as I’m concerned.
A few years ago I was heading to the major city children hospital near us for a post op follow up for my kid. GPS said it would take 1.5hrs to get there so I left 2hrs early to make sure we get parking and we’re able to get to the appointment early. Well traffic ended up being so bad it took 4hrs to get to the hospital. I called ahead of time and asked if it was ok that we still go to the appointment because we were running way later than expected. The doc office said it was fine and to just get there as soon as we could. So we got to to hospital and up to the office and they saw us right away. Well the doc gets in the room and she starts yelling at me about being late and how disrespectful it is and how us being late impacts everyone’s day. I apologized a few times as she continued to yell. Finally I said calmly “ok lady we get it. I apologized and I called ahead and your office folks said it was fine.”. Well she lost it on me after that. She said “DO NOT SCREAM AT ME OR THREATEN ME!”, then she told the nurse to call security to escort me out. I very calmly said “I did not yell. I did not threaten anyone. I simply said we understood and I don’t need to be lectured on it. It’s sounds like we all have had a stressful morning so let’s just continue with the appointment and call it a day.” And that is exactly what we did. Any followup we have had since then has been very pleasant. Just caught her on a bad day I guess.
Better than me. I would’ve had an attitude every time I had to go back.
Thankfully we only have to see her once every 6 months or so. Plus she’s been absolutely great since the incident. I think she was probably a little embarrassed afterwards.
A few “five minutes late” appointments go by, and before you know it they’re an hour behind! It’s crazy
Let’s blame them.
Maybe, and I don’t doubt that urgent appointments happen and they try to squeeze them in and I understand that, one day it might be me.
But talking specifically about my kid’s pediatrician and my wife’s obstetrician, we several times were scheduled for a specific time, and we came to learn we were scheduled in 10 to 15 minutes windows, and most times the appointment would last for at least 20 to 30 minutes.
So they do have some blame, and they charge too much not to have some semblance of time keeping.
They’re an hour behind schedule because everyone ahead of you was 5 minutes late.
Once, I was literally 2 minutes late. The doctor was busy talking to a nurse and only asked for me in 5 minutes, at which point he asked me why I’m almost 10 minutes late.
If you’re 5 minutes late, you get seen 40 minutes after your appointment time. If you’re five minutes early, you are seen 10 minutes or more past your appointment time. Yep totally makes sense. And totally makes sense that people itt are making this fact the patients’ faults.
Mine has a smile on their face as long as they can overcharge me for not helping me.
Which is every single time.
Cause and effect. Don’t be late
Last visit, the woman at the desk told me my doctor was running an hour behind. I knew that meant I’d be waiting closer to two hours. I sighed, sat down, thought for a moment, and went back to the desk to reschedule the appointment. I did the doctor and me a favor. She got a free spot in her schedule to catch up, and I didn’t need to sit around for two hours.
I postponed a visit for months because of covid and Quarantäne. At thr moment, it seemed like a really important visit.
Almost lost the turn, commuted through the whole city… the doctor arrived 2,5 hours late. She was not even sorry.
