[Tommy]

DougD,

I'm pleased you've found a tactic that works for you with your doctor. I thought of that one too and it does work sometimes for me. However, I've found that for some doctors even the first appointment of the day is not seen on time because the staff will allow people without appointments to walk in and be seen. I also learned that several of my doctors schedule appointments in clumps. For example, they'll schedule three people at 9:00 AM and then three more at 9:30 AM. This says that even if things go exactly on schedule, one patient will be seen ten minutes late and the next twenty minutes late. It's a great way to assure the doctor has no empty spots in his schedule at the expense of making patients wait. I just happen to think that an hour of my life is as important to me as an hour of his life is to him.

Incidentally, I've discussed this problem several times with the staffs of several different doctors. The two most common excuses for long waits are (1) we want to make sure each patient gets all the time he needs to be treated properly, and (2) an unexpected emergency arose that required the doctor's time. The problem with both of those excuses is they ignore the fact that the doctor could factor in time for both of those situations if he (1) cared about wasting his customers' time, and (2) monitored the average wait time for his patients and adjusted future scheduluing to reduce the waiting time. I agree that there is no way to assure a particular patient will not have to wait on a particular day, but over a period of a month the average wait should not be excessive.