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Monday, October 3,
2005
Getting bad
reception?
by Kim Painter, USA
TODAY
Think of the last
time you called or visited the office of a doctor, dentist or other health care
provider.
How were you
treated by the person who answered the phone or staffed the front desk? If the
answer is "badly," you are not alone. When Suzanne Boswell, a consultant in
Raleigh, N.C., surveyed patients nationwide, she found that only 38% agreed that
their doctors' front-office team was "courteous." Dental offices did better; 59%
passed the courtesy test. But many were rated downright
rude.
Some patients get treatment that goes beyond rude. One woman I know still
cringes over the day a receptionist shouted out her name in a busy waiting room
and asked how long she had had her brain
tumor.
Boswell sees it all. As part of her business, she acts as a "mystery
patient," going into medical and dental offices to get a patient's-eye view. She
sees wonderful offices where every patient is greeted with a smile and treated
with respect and where staffs are well-trained to protect patient privacy and
handle emergencies.
And, like many people, she encounters:
• Phone-answering systems
and front-desk procedures that seem designed to prevent patients from talking to
anyone.
• Receptionists and clerks who don't even look
at patients standing before them. Staffers stay glued to their computer
monitors, or talk amongst themselves, while patients wait.
• Staffers who make offhand remarks that indicate they don't much like
their jobs — or patients. Boswell recalls that one focus-group participant told
her: "I was standing at the counter and the receptionist said to me, 'Excuse me
while I get rid of this patient on the phone.' I figure that's what she says
about me when I call in."
Is the cold
shoulder you perceive at your doctor's office just part of the general
coarsening of society? That might play a role. But there's another side to the
story.
Consider: The
average medical receptionist — the person assigned to answer phones and greet
patients (or not) in most practices — makes roughly $10 to $13 an hour,
depending on her experience, according to The Health Care Group in Plymouth
Meeting, Pa. For that modest pay, she and her front-desk colleagues
must handle mountains of paperwork, an endlessly ringing phone and — because of
increasing demands on doctors to cover costs by seeing more patients — an
often-packed waiting room. The result is a system that rewards cool efficiency
and discourages cordial chitchat.
"For the most
part, they're just doing their jobs," says practice consultant and attorney Mark
Kropiewnicki of The Health Care Group. "There's a routine. And if 20 people are
calling at the same time, and you are the person trying to get all this done,
it's a lot to ask."
And
then there's us — the patients. We aren't always as nice as we could be, either.
"Sometimes when patients talk to the person at the front desk, they are very
brusque and nasty," says Joseph Heyman, an obstetrician and gynecologist in
Amesbury, Mass., who sits on the board of the American Medical Association. The
same patients, he says, are often very polite to him — which suggests they are
taking out their frustrations on people they perceive as lower in
status.
The pressure gets
to those front-line staffers. They have a turnover rate of 22% a year,
Kropiewnicki says.
But patients can
"turn over," too, and find new caregivers. And, increasingly, when faced with
rude or incompetent front-office treatment, they do just that, Boswell says.
"Consumers are becoming very discerning. They have choices, and they are not
going to put up with what they put up with in the past."
Learn when phone lines are busiest — often on
Monday mornings and after lunch each day — and save non-urgent calls
for other times.