I feel like I should be a reviewer for urgent care centers and emergency rooms. I was a "secret shopper" for Panda Express once where you got a free meal and 12 dollars to go to their restaurants and secretly review the quality of the food and how well the franchise was exemplifying the corporate brand image. Being a hungry graduate student, getting a free meal was worth driving a few miles and using a strange bathroom.
The Panda Express company was very focused on the friendliness of its people; were they helpful, did they answer questions, did they make you feel like they genuinely cared about whether or not the orange chicken delighted you? I recall about a page of questions about their attitude, even more than the cleanliness and signage. My experience yesterday highlights how much I wish Panda Express ran an urgent care center.
At the one week follow up on my joint fusion in my thumb, where I was of course not healed enough and too swollen for casting, Dr. H rewrapped and splinted my hand, with the hope of a cast next week. I then got ready to visit my "best friend of all time" (hereinafter called BFOAT) in Pasco. She fortunately had both vacation time and air conditioning, two critical helps after joint surgery in summer. Unfortunately about an hour into the drive I began to have these spiking pains in my hand, as though I had poked a pin in my hand hand from the bone side out, directly under the splint. After 2 more hours of shifting, moving and stuffing things in between the splint and my hand, I finally took the dressing apart until I could take the hard part of the splint off, which instantly reduced the feeling of having something drilling out of my hand. It was now about 7 at night, so,rather than waste ER time, I unwrapped it up so the splint was under my hand, rather than over the top, and figured I would get it 're-wrapped in the morning.
First thing in the morning(in my morning anyway, I did just have surgery and a restless night after all) I went to the urgent care clinic nearest BFOAT's home. It was almost empty with three office staff at the front, huddled around the computer monitor. No one was in the waiting room.. I explained the situation, and they responded immediately- with an impressive amount of irritation. The nurse tells me that orthopedists are "picky" about their work; I should go back there. After pointing out a second time the orthopedist in question was 5 hours away, and that they don't have associates in the area, they reluctantly agreed to have me sign in. No quicker than it took to me to sign in, Nurse Ratchet came to the desk to tell me that the doctor wouldn't even look at me without talking to my doctor on the phone directly, which I am expected to arrange. Trying to get two doctors on the phone is like trying to arrange a blind date with a couple of porcupines. She told me if I didn't like that I should go to an emergency room. Since my insurance charges me an extra $100 to go to the ER if I'm not admitted and 're-wrapping,was almost certainly not going to result in hospitalization, I attempted to arrange an appointment between the doctors about 2 1/2 hours from then. They really didn't care what I did until then.
When we went back to the increasingly badly named Healing Waters urgent,care, they were now so busy we would have to take a number to get to the receptionist, who would accept the call arranged on my cell phone once their doctor was between appointments presuming my doctor was also available, and they would discuss whether the doctor would see me or not. After all this time, my hand was becoming increasingly painful, the number of children in the waiting room wasn't helping, and my pain pill was wearing off. I ended up checking Health Grades online for the best rated ER in the area and decided to bite the bullet, pay the $100 and get my hand 're-wrapped before I started going postal.
The staff at Healing Waters may not have been indifferent and may in fact be kind, caring people who were not often confronted with people asking for post-surgical assistance. They may have been concerned that they would do more harm than good. But they also never offered to bring the doctor out to to see what was the matter or let me explain the situation to the doctor directly so he or she could decide if this was a task within his competence. I'm assuming that the urgent care center hires medical professionals capable of wrapping broken thumbs or wrists.Just because a scalpel broke it, it is still essentially just a broken bone. They never offered to,call my physicians office for me: do you know how hard it is to use a cell phone with one hand? It's like trying to hold onto a small greased harmonica and try to play Yankee doodle at the same time. They didn't even tell me where the ER was, despite knowing that I was from out of town- and based on their name, they were affiliated with the hospital I ended up going to.
Panda Express realized that the food was important but the friendliness and customer service made just as important a contribution. No one wants food from a surly wait staff (except possibly possibly at certain coffee shops whose popularity is based on the misanthropy of its staff). Health care is a service business in which your clientele is generally in much more discomfort than hunger is and they are seeking comfort and reassurance during a difficult time. Is it too much to ask that the front desk appear to care about more than your ability to pay? Would it have irreparably damaged them to offer as much information about the hospitals in the area as I would have gotten from the clerk at Motel 6? I am going to have to pay at least an extra $100 for services they could have done had they been interested in me as more than a problem to be avoided.
Paula Deen was fired from the Food Network not because she was racist: almost every comment from people outside this one lawsuit has been positive and denied ever having had a negative experience with her. Who she was personally didn't enter into it; her public image represents the company's reputation and therefore their bottom line. In an era in which customers can and do rate their doctors and hospitals online as often as their plumber or landscaper, front desk staff need to be evaluated on how well they represent the facility brand image. $100 and 6 hours of waiting is not something I will be likely to forget.
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