Letting your schedule run late shows disrespect

Ethics Forum. Nov. 5, 2001.

Scenario: What responsibility do physicians have to keep appointments as scheduled?

Reply:

This question posed by a reader of American Medical News echoes a concern often expressed in patient surveys. Physician tardiness is often the leading cause of patient dissatisfaction with medical care. The problem seems to be the most acutely perceived in the setting of the doctor's office but is also often confronted in the delivery of hospital-based and outpatient medical services.

The answer would seem to be a "no-brainer." If a physician's office schedule is designed to deliver optimum, efficient, quality medical care, common sense would dictate that any significant deviation from that schedule would represent movement in the direction of lesser quality care.

Physicians often perceive this decline as more of a public relations issue than a substantive problem. Appointment delays are seen as a simple reality of modern medical practice, an issue both unsurprising and unimportant. We are all too familiar with the ready explanations and excuses offered by physicians for the delays that patients experience in their office -- emergencies, unexpectedly sicker patients requiring more than the allotted time, interruptions by hospital and doctor calls, late arrivals of scheduled patients and unexpected arrivals of unscheduled patients.

Physicians often hide behind the relatively sophisticated and high-minded utilitarian argument that their responsibility is to use their time and expert skills to provide the greatest good to the greatest number of patients. [...]