ptrbs

I don’t know if this is common in other countries, but in Germany I have experienced long waiting periods at the general practitioner's office time and time again. Mind you, this is with an appointment booked.

This morning was no different. I had booked an appointment to have some blood drawn at 08:35, which fit nicely between dropping off my son at kindergarten and my hairdresser appointment. I arrived, like a proper German, around 10-15 mins before my appointment at the doctor’s office. I was promptly directed to “wait for a short time” in the waiting room.

From my experience, this “waiting for a short time” is either 1-5 mins or 45+ mins. Unfortunately, today was not a lucky 1-5 mins day for me. In the end, it took them nearly an hour to call my name and to take my blood. Since it was for a blood test, I was not able to eat anything beforehand, so I slowly started to wonder in that waiting room how long I would last before I would pass out. Fortunately, it did not come to that in the end.

I always wonder how you book an appointment for a certain time and still have to wait 1+ hours. You might think it is a backlog of patients they have to get through, and one delay caused another, which blocked the whole system. However, the doc office opens at 08:00 in the morning, so how can it be blocked 30 minutes after? More importantly, why does this happen time and time again and never get fixed?

I wonder if doc offices overbook every morning and then “see how it goes”? Is this a viable strategy they are actually using, or am I just making things up? I mean, you could potentially cram a lot more patients in a shorter timeframe, but it would also really piss off people who wait a long time when they do have an appointment. But maybe these pissed-off patients have nowhere else to go, and the practice knows it.

My next visit is tomorrow…