A visit to the Doctor… healing or stressing?
Going to the Doctor can be a stressful experience. Not only are you feeling rotten, having managed to only just drag yourself out of bed, but you are also thrust into a waiting room of coughing adults and
sniveling toddlers. In order to escape from the horrors of the room, you bury yourself in that tattered edition of Hello magazine (lying there since 1994), only to discover you neglected to hear the receptionist’s feeble attempt to pronounce your name and call you into surgery. You ma, in fact, have missed your appointment altogether.
Patient Call Displays provide surgeries with a quicker, clearer and more efficient method of calling patients to their appointments. The surgery’s database appointments software simply feeds all the day’s appointments onto each doctor’s computer for them to see when they switch on. The doctor from his own workstation can then signal when he is ready for the next patient and the patient’s name and the doctor’s name and room number automatically appears on the signboard in the waiting room. The appearance of a name in large illuminated letters is accompanied by a distinct sound alerting the patients that someone’s name has appeared.
Advantages?
The advantages of this system are of course numerous. It has considerably changed the workings of thousands of practices throughout the UK making them more efficient and saving many surgeries over 3 hours a week.
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The receptionist is free to work on more valuable tasks.
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The receptionist is no longer under pressure as when the surgeries’ numerous physicians all buzzed her simultaneously to call their next patient.
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GPs spend their time treating patients, not scouring the waiting room for them or waiting for an available receptionist to call them.
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With almost 9 million deaf and hearing-impaired people in the UK (1 in 7 patients), a visual call display is now a priority
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Patients can clearly see their name, the GP’s name and the consulting room number without feeling embarrassed or having to ask for the information repeatedly. The details keep displaying until the patient has arrived to the consulting room.
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The systems can also be used to continually display clinic information and health promotion messages in between calling names. For example, the season for flu-vaccines can be advertised increasing patient awareness
Of equal importance is for practices to build in a protocol to ensure that the Doctor knows if a sight impaired person is waiting and a procedure is in place for the patient to be collected by the Doctor. Natural speech announcements are possible on some systems to deal with this requirement.
How popular is this system?
The system is already in use by over 3500 surgeries around the UK.
Paula Jones
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