For the past two weeks, I have been going to clinics and hospitals. Talking to patients, doctors (and their secretaries), and pharma professionals. One thing stood out, and that is there’s a lot of waiting.

At this time and age, where information is supposed to be at the tip of our fingertips, why is it only on the latest news, fashion trends, or showbiz news? We have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat – but when you want to see a Doctor, what App do I use?

Sentiment

These are some of the feedback that I got:

• “Waiting is expected”
• Arrive at 9Am and expect to see the Doctor at around 11AM
• “If I take my son to the Doctor,  I free up half of my day for the appointment”
• “I don’t have any issues with waiting because there are other patients too”
• “Kids become restless”
• “I visit the pedia every month for my baby’s routine checkup”
• “He’s the best Pedia in the city, I have to wait”

These comments came from unstructured interviews and naturally “waiting” came up.

Doctors that I’ve talked to also don’t like that their patients spend hours outside the clinic waiting, the longer the queue should be good for them (more patients, right?) but they honestly don’t feel good about people waiting.

Culture

I have observed that  we just wait it out because we don’t have a choice, I think this is a culture thing. On another note, we did a study on the needs of “palengke” goers and found that there are two factors that determine their buying behavior: First, their budget; Second, the weight of their basket/plastic bag. The second reason struck me, if they have money they can actually buy more but they cannot because they can’t carry them anymore. Comments we got “ganyan talaga eh, wala ka nang magagawa…”. Believe that we Filipinos are resilient people – we are OK with waiting, we are OK with a little suffering, we are OK carrying some load.

Maybe we can bring in something really disruptive, in our case, cut down wait times and use that instead for more meaningful activities.

Advocacy

Wasting time waiting for the Doctor  is a personal pain for me and I have made it a mission to minimize it. Would it be great if:

• Wait times are cut down to 15 to 30 mins?
• You have an estimate of what time you will be served?
• You know if the doctors is IN/OUT without texting or calling the secretary?

These are the things we are trying to solve, I’m curious to know if there are many of you out there who share the pain and would love to have it resolved – if you do, please like and share.

A solution is coming, change is coming, soon.

We hope that you’re next visit to the Doctor won’t consume 1 to 3 hours of your precious time, waiting.