Let me start by saying this: I love the NHS. I am deeply, deeply grateful for its existence. It has saved my life not once, but twice. It has given me the potential to one day give birth (having originally completely destroyed it – but we’ll gloss over that). It is an extraordinary institution, and I feel lucky to live in a country where it exists.
But! But…
Yesterday I went to my local hospital for an appointment entirely unrelated to infertility.
I arrived 35 minutes early, as is my wont, but couldn’t let anyone know, because all the stupid electronic check-in kiosks were turned off. There were no receptionists at the reception desks. Because I know how the NHS works, I sat down to wait.
Another woman, about my age but clearly less knowledgeable about the ways of the NHS, was lingering near the kiosks, clutching a coffee and looking around anxiously. She wandered, haltingly, towards the reception desks, paused, and wandered back to the kiosks. She lingered for another minute, shifting from foot to foot, then wandered back to the reception desks.
After about five minutes of this, she spotted a man with an authoritative-looking lanyard, and strode over.
“Do you know how to check in?” she asked, gesticulating at the kiosks. “They’re all switched off.”
The man gazed in the direction of the empty reception desks and said: “You need to tell the receptionists.” She looked at him wonderingly. He shrugged. She sat down, muttering violently.
After I had checked in, three minutes before my appointment, I took a seat.
Another three-quarters of an hour passed before I was seen. Which is fine, because the NHS works at its own pace, and waiting is a small price to pay to benefit from its services.
But as I waited, I felt a familiar anxiety begin to rise in me. Have I been forgotten? Did the receptionist check me in properly? That woman over there arrived half an hour after me and has just gone in – is there a special password to be given priority?
Meanwhile, people were being called into their appointments on a PA system which was simultaneously quiet and almost completely obscured by reverb, which meant every time an announcement took place, the entire room had to fall silent and strain to hear. If a baby was crying, it was game over.
The point of this rant is that so much of the anxiety and stress of NHS appointments could be prevented by decent expectation management. A screen showing patients’ names (or NHS numbers for anonymity) and where they are in the queue would solve a huge amount of the stress patients experience.
I get the same anxiety when I’m at my IVF clinic, for the same reasons. I know enough about how the place works by now to know several different clinics are run from the same waiting room, meaning some people will go in ahead of others. But waiting is still stressful.
Managing patients’ expectations would go a long way to solving a lot of the anger and aggression experienced by patients in the NHS. It’s something to think about, anyway.
The tired girl's guide to infertility 