Saturday, April 28, 2007

How can Doctors and Dentists get by with so bad service?

You schedule an appointment for 11am. The receptionist grabs your credit card number because if you do not show up you are charged 75$ for a no-show. She tells you nothing about the appointment - nothing about what is going to be done, no pre-requisites, nothing.
You show up 10-15 mins early because you already know (nobody told you) that you have to fill in this LONG questionnaire about yourself. The 10-15 min early is "common knowledge" about doctors.
Once you fill the questionnaire it's 11.05 and you think you're doing good for a on-time appointment.
That's where you're soooo wrong. You sit and wait - and you also understand why they have such a large collection of diverse magazines there. You read one, two, three from head to tail, and when it's 12.30 they call you in. There's a light at the end of the tunnel, you wonder. No, it's just a service light in the middle of the tunnel.
They take your vitals, and the doctor spends no more than 10 mins with you and sends you back to the waiting room.
That's already 12.45 and the nurse who was going to take your blood and give you your shots goes for lunch. But before going she tells you she needs a urine sample. BTW, nowhere nobody said that, so of course you're not ready for it. Plus, it's almost 1pm and you didn't have lunch. It's OK, though, you're healthy, so you drink 4-6 glasses of water in the 30 mins she was out for lunch.
Before she's back, they realize you've been there for 2+ hours and send the other nurse to attend you. It's 1.15 and you're back in the room again, and now you desperately need to go to the bathroom, but you wait - the new nurse goes over your file and starts reading it to find out what you need. You tell her what you need - can't afford to wait longer.
You get your first shot and the other nurse comes back from lunch and sends the one that was taking care of you to lunch - another 5 mins lost. She draws your blood and gives you the 2nd shot. You finally make it to the bathroom, collect the sample, and you're back at the reception. It's now 1.45, and after 15 more minutes you pay them and you're ready to go.
No, wait, you have to come back on Monday to get the paperwork and the results - nobody told you that either. At least you now know how long it takes, so you ask them what's the best time - 8.45, and that's when you'll show up on Monday.
So, you leave their office at 2pm, when you go grab lunch and now face 45 mins traffic to get back to work.
Total time spent: 10.40am to 3pm.
Now, do you get 75$ per hour of "delay" in your appointment? A regular company would have discounted the regular salary pay per hour of work lost, but your company is good and does not do it.
But seriously, why can doctors get by with such lousy behavior? They could at least have told you they were 1 hour or so late so you could have grabbed lunch and come back later. Or even rescheduled some people.
If you had such behavior in your job you'd probably get fired or you would lose your clients.

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

I had doctors that after seeing me they would go away and not even say goodbye or even indicate that the consulation was over... so I kept waiting in the room until a nurse would pass by and ask "You still here?"... talk about "not giving a damn" about other people's time...

12:03 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home