Quote:
Originally Posted by CFrance
It seems to me that if your day is fully booked from the get-go, it's guaranteed that there will be no time to fit this in without causing patients to wait... "if someone presented to the clinic with a problem, they would be seen. If a patient was very late for their appointment, they would be seen. If a patient showed up on the wrong day, they would be seen. Added to those were patients sent to us by other departments. And, of course, we added our own patients who required follow-up even though there were no available appointments."
That's the same thing as overbooking, in my opinion. They shouldn't have booked your day so fully that you couldn't accommodate these other issues that pop up. Or else establish some rules that latecomers would not be seen, wrong-day patients would not be seen, patients sent by other departments scheduled in at another time. And limit the number of patients or appointments to accommodate these things.
There were many good doctors in my former state who simply got to the point where they would not accept new patients because they couldn't be accommodated.
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Booking fewer patients in advance per day results in extending the wait time for a routine appt to an unsatisfactory level. While this thread is about the wait once you get to an appt, there are other threads/posts that have concerns regarding the wait to get that appt. For example, at one point, the wait for a routine appt with me was approaching three months. Completely unacceptable. The best solution would be to add staff to better handle the patient volume. But that means additional space for them to work and additional support staff and room for them. Then there needs to be more OR time for the additional staff, and more beds for patients that require admission. And on and on. So, let's build another facility. But the response of insurance companies and government to increasing health care costs is to cut reimbursement to health care providers, so where does the money come from to make these changes.
Another's solution is to add extenders such as PAs or NPs. But we've seen how some patients object to not seeing the doctor.
Do I have an answer? Nope. I guess I just am troubled by the inference that because a patient is kept waiting that the doctor doesn't care. My personal experience is that most of the time a patient may be kept waiting because the doctor really does care, for the patient right there in front of them, which is their primary concern at the moment.