(originally published April 21st, 2005)

Early this morning, I had to take my wife to the emergency room. The process that had to be performed eventually worked, and she was fine. However, having to go through such a process as the family member as opposed to being a patient or working in the emergency room is a terrible position to be in.

Though time gets away from you, and minutes can seem like hours, it’s hard to keep your composure when your loved one is going through any kind of distress. Now, because I’m like I am, I know precisely the time that my wife had to go through each stage of the process, and in her case it was hours a couple of times. When we got to the emergency room, it was 10 minutes before she was seen by triage. It was 5 minutes after that when she was seen by the registration person. It was 10 minutes after that before she was finally called back to a patient room.

It was another hour and forty minutes before a physician finally came to see her. This is the hospital my wife works for, so this proves that employees do not step to the front of the line. During this initial period, I had to fight my frustrations that no one had come to see her. As an assistant supervisor of emergency room at this same facility about 17 years earlier, and having been over other registration personnel at other facilities, you learn that during the evening emergency rooms usually have less personnel on hand. And those personnel will see patients based on criteria rather than first come, first serve, which is true during the day also, but seems to be magnified at times when it’s in the evening because there’s fewer physicians on hand also.

Knowing this doesn’t make the process any less stressful for the family member or the patient, for whom distress seems to intensify 10 times over based on time. Me being me, I tried to help kill the time by reading to my wife and telling her a few jokes, trying to keep her talking to she wouldn’t notice the time all that much, which was hard since the clock was directly in front of her. And when the physician finally did show, and that ended up producing a series of adventures during the rest of our time there, I treated him, and the specialist who eventually had to come in, with courtesy as well, just glad both were trying their best to alleviate the worries and affliction my wife was going through.

When it comes to healthcare, customer service needs to be a two-way street. Family members need to realize that often there are other patients whose needs may be more critical than the needs of their loved ones. They also need to realize the stress physicians can be under in emergency situations. Healthcare personnel, on the other hand, need to be vigilant themselves as to the needs of their patients and their family members. Whereas I was trying to keep my wife’s mind off her difficulties as much as possible, during that hour and 40 minutes the nurse only came to the room once to see how she was doing; I’m thinking that wasn’t the best customer service in the world. Still, everything ended up fine in the long run, and that was the most important thing in the world.