“You’re 7 minutes late,” the man at the front deck at my doctor’s office told me this morning. “We have a no more than 10-minute late rule or we must reschedule. This is close, so I’ll have to ask the doctor if it’s ok to check you in.” He returned to the window rather quickly to say that the doctor had given him permission. After he did so, I asked the man if he were aware that the indoor parking structure was under renovation. “It took me a good 10 to 15 minutes to find a spot once I arrived, so many were blocked off.”
“I didn’t know that, “he said. “Employees don’t park there.”
“I figured you didn’t know that so that’s why I wanted to tell you so you could warn other patients to allow for the extended time they’ll need to find a spot.”
I’m fully aware that most people would leave the matter there, but I’ve worked as a social worker and taught as a professor of social work in the health care concentration at a school of social work. We social workers are always thinking “how can we streamline this system, so it works better for everyone?”
So, I decide to offer my information to another member of my physician’s staff, a woman escorting me into one of the examining rooms. “Did you know that it takes 10 to 15 minutes for a patient to find an available parking place in the building’s structure due to so many spaces being roped off for the renovation? The man at the front desk didn’t know this so I just thought I’d tell everybody that works here.”
“He wouldn’t know that” she says in a defensive tone of voice. “Employees don’t park there.”
By now, I realize we’re not seeing eye to eye about this situation. But I don’t discourage easily. I give my information to the doctor when he comes in the room after I apologize to the new 4th year student doctor that’s about to graduate. I tell her, “We old people have lots of opinions about everything, but since I ran a behavioral health clinic for 10 years, I feel the need to inform the health care team about potential obstructions to their operation. The doctor laughs and agrees that issues like the parking structure renovation that no one seems to know anything about cause him to run behind in his schedule most days. He feels sorry for the patients, and he mentioned some other situations where the delays are even worse.
I assume that the goal of most workers is to do a good job, but I know that health care is a team effort, involving staff, providers, and patients. In a study I did for our clinic we found that there were 42 steps from when the first call came in requesting service, till the payment for that service landing in our bank account. The health providers service was only one of those steps. If any of the steps were done out of order, we would not get paid.
This reminded me of the saying, popularized from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits– “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” As doctors and nurses waste their valuable time waiting on patients to find a parking place, and patients like me, having been sent to Starbucks to fill their water bottle brought from home, roam the halls to find a water fountain, while attempting to operate those “push the button” automatic heavy doors–I like to imagine I could be a “secret patient.” Like in retail establishments where they hire people to try out the system and give them feedback about the bugs in it. By now it would likely take a team of” secret patients” and a team of willing listeners to encourage our health care system to continually improve and work better for everybody.
