It is a common complaint. Patients are asked to wait beyond their appointment time in a busy doctor’s office. You have made the effort to arrive on time for your appointment, perhaps even arriving early so if your appointment is delayed you may think to yourself, “Is it too much to ask for the Doctor to be considerate of my time and see my child promptly?” Your kids may be tired, hungry or crying and the frustration can build every minute that you are kept waiting. Please know the physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners in our office are trying very hard to be on time. Let’s look at some reasons why our Providers have trouble staying on schedule and some things that both the office staff and you can do to minimize this problem.
First, remember, our commitment is to make sure your child is healthy. If you are waiting for your Provider, and wonder where on earth they could possibly be, you can be sure that they are taking care of children. Most of the time, we are aware that we are running behind and work very diligently to get back on schedule. If there are children in our Reception Area, you can be assured we will not go home until everyone has been seen.
There are a number of steps that we take to stay on time. One, we plan for more time in our schedule than a standard appointment usually takes. This allows extra time should a problem arise. Two, our Schedulers ask the nature of the problem when you call to make an appointment, so we can schedule an appropriate amount of time. Three, we try to make all visits by appointment only. Occasionally, we do have ‘walk-ins’ in the middle of the day and they do disrupt our schedule. Four, we utilize our Nursing staff to perform laboratory tests and immunizations. This frees up the Provider’s time so they may see the kids.
Despite these measures, we do get behind at times. We do want to stress that your time is important to us. That is why we offer convenient office hours. Four days a week we are open 7:00 am until 7:00 pm and we offer weekend hours. However, there is one thing that is more important than your time, and that is the health and welfare of your child and the children in our clinic. When we sit down with you in the office, our goal is to address all your concerns, examine your child and give you our best advice. We will not compromise the care of our children, period. We are hopeful that all of our parents will understand when we treat all of the children in our clinic this way.
Therein lies the problem. Sometimes this kind of care requires more time than we had planned on. The only way that we could always be on time is to set an alarm clock and walk out when time is up whether your questions have been fully addressed or not. We simply cannot and will not operate this way.
There are some things that you can do to help. When making an appointment, please let the Scheduler know if you have a number of concerns. If we know ahead of time that there is more than one concern, we can schedule extra time. If you would like more than one child seen, please make appointments for both children rather than just one. If you have a problem that seems complex to you, an extended list of concerns, or a chronic problem lasting months to years rather than days or a couple of weeks, then please ask for extra time when you schedule your appointment. These will help our schedulers to keep me on time.
“The best laid plans…”
Unfortunately, both parents and providers can do everything in our power to keep the schedule on time but occasionally we will still get behind. In those cases, we will do our very best to keep you abreast of how long the wait might be, and give you the opportunity to reschedule if time constraints are prohibitive. Please be understanding of our Front Desk staff. They cannot always predict a schedule problem until after it has occurred.
If you should find that you are not satisfied with the timeliness of your care, please speak directly with our Office Manager. Bringing it up with your Provider or Nursing staff is fine, but that time is better spent treating your child.
Please accept our apology ahead of time should you ever have an extended wait, but we are hopeful that it would be such a rare occurrence that you will never experience this problem or can be understanding when it does.
