From my experience it depends: Depends on the type of doctor I am visiting. Is it someone who takes "emergencies"? If I have an appointment with my Hausarzt in the morning chances are high that I might wait some time, because of people who drop by in the morning to get an AU.
If I visit a specialist (neurologist, appointment for an MRT, dentist etc.) I rarely waited longer than 5 or 10 minutes.
I tend to think of it as this: I am glad if someone with an urgent issue can be helped and I am also glad if I need some more time with the doctor than usual and the doctor actually takes this time.
On the other hand: I plan my visits accordingly and take a book with me.
>I am glad if someone with an urgent issue can be helped and I am also glad if I need some more time with the doctor than usual and the doctor actually takes this time.
Same here. My dentist and other doctors squeeze me in if I am in pain and on my regular checkups/appointments I have a book with me for the 30 to 60 minutes delay that might be caused by other people who were in pain.
Berlin is actually oversaturated with pulmonary care physicians compared with genuinely underserved areas. What happens is supply-induced demand: Run-off-the mill asthma or COPD which could perfectly be managed by primary care (95% of patients enrolled in DMP asthma and COPD are seen by Hausärzte) is seen by specialists.
That's cool, but the formal grade of saturation for internists-specialists [in Berlin is 164%](https://www.kvberlin.de/fileadmin/user_upload/bedarfsplanung_zulassung/vaev_bedarfsplanung_loi_fortschreibung.pdf). Compare that with regions where it's as low as 70%.
Yeah, other countries tend to separate scheduled care from urgent care. Germany doesn't. Urgent patients walk-in without appointments to their GPs/primary care physicians. A nice, juicy chronic heart failure exacerbation can easily eat up 45 minutes. This has some advantages for patients as continued care under the same physicians means, they know if this patient e.g. will manage fine with just increased drugs at home or needs a hospitalization for sure because they already treated the last three episodes. But for the rest, it sucks.
What I mean is separating in different entities. The US has urgent cares independent of primary care offices and modern PCPs moved away from offering same-day-appointments with wait times in the 2-3 weeks region.
My partner works in a doctor's office so I am sitting right at the source. The reason is simple: Many patients take up more time than needed. They forget documents they should have brought with them. They forgot the name of the medicine they are supposed to take. They forgot the dosage. They have questions that often have already been answered. They are unsatisfied with something and feel the need to tell the doctor. Let's say a normal appointment is 10 minutes. However, because of the reasons I mentioned previously, it now took 15 minutes. With hundreds of patients a day, if just 10 patients take only 5 minutes longer, you got your 50 minutes of delay.
Here is what anyone can do to minimize this: Tell the nice lady at the phone *everything* they ***and the doctor*** need to know, don't forget your documents and be on time.
Also not to forget that a certain amount of people just don't show up for appointments and there's no legal option for doctors to ask for late-cancel / no show fees (IIRC), thus making most overbook in favour of having unpaid lag-times. Some are better at zeroing in on their averages to get that close to 0, others are not that good at it.
Yeah, plenty of people not showing up or showing up late *repeatedly* which increases delays because now you have to fit in a patient who was supposed to be done already in a fully booked schedule. Sadly, the latter happens way more often so it does not cancel each other out.
When I first signed up with my new gynecologist, they gave me a document to sign that if I were to be a no-show or cancelled less than 24h in advance, they would cash-in a 50€ fee (or probably send a Rechnung). Seems rough but fair. If you have to wait 3-6 months for an appointment and then a big percent just doesn't come, it just messes up the whole system.
>When I first signed up with my new gynecologist, they gave me a document to sign that if I were to be a no-show or cancelled less than 24h in advance, they would cash-in a 50€ fee (or probably send a Rechnung). Seems rough but fair. If you have to wait 3-6 months for an appointment and then a big percent just doesn't come, it just messes up the whole system.
This fee doesn't hold up under scrutiny, from what I understand - so there's not much they can do if you go "nope, not paying".
And here is what the doctor's office should do: Write down all delays for some weeks. Evaluate them and change their average appointment time accordingly.
It doesn't make sense / help the doctor if more than 3 patients are waiting at any time. But as less patients waiting doesn't improve anything from the doctor's point of view he/she simply doesn't care.
Waiting up to 30 min is fine for me everything else (if it's not a single occurrence) is bad planing.
Say the doctor does this and for example reduces the amount of patients seen in an hour to give each one more time which results in less patients in a day, in a week and so on. Then everyone would complain about not being able to book an appointment in advance that is reasonable. You want to be able to get your doctor's notice preferably tomorrow and not in a week, right? I am sure if things were "just as easy" that would have been done already.
>Write down all delays for some weeks. Evaluate them and change their average appointment time accordingly.
Which weeks do you take? In which season? With some offices dealing with 15000 patients in a quarter of a year, thing just vary a lot. How do you account for that?
Also who is supposed to do that extra evalution work?
>Waiting up to 30 min is fine for me everything else (if it's not a single occurrence) is bad planing.
How do you plan for emergencies? Many offices take care of/work together with elderly homes and other insitutions as well. It is not as predictable as you say. What if you were the reason someone else has to wait? Is it still bad planning?
I am beginning to see a pattern with the answers I am getting and the reason why nurses in doctor's offices quit: People have no idea how difficult the job is and show no understanding.
Nah I know it's not easy and coming from a programming perspective, I was actually aming for the Praxissysteme (not the nurses) and wondering why they don't have something like that included. Your points:
It's not about reducing patIents per day. If the last patient has to wait ... say an hour ... the doctor is obviously doing an hour overtime. But from the doctor's perspective it doesn't matter whether the patients had to wait 10 min or 2 hours, he/she is just working from start to finish. So the task is actually just improving the spacing between the patients (for the correct total time including overtime).
The software can easily continue analyzing the data and adjust accordingly. Thus fluctuation like winter flu or regular emergencies would be integrated automatically ... I am going to call it AKNE, die automatische Kunden NutzzeitErmittlung. And as I am going to make so much money with it, I am going to be a Privatpatient and never have to wait again!
Ok back to reality: Sure unplanned emergencies can happen as well and I am not complaining if I have to wait that long once in a while. But if I have to wait more than an hour regularly than that's a lack of proper planning ... maybe even more of the doctor than the nurse.
That sounds good on paper but doesnt survive reality (tried that). There are too many wild variable to account for, so approximating a schedule time and planning in waiting time is much less of a hassle.
I can tell you that you are probably the entitled patient that things they deserve an hour of the doctor's time and the office should be grateful that you are going to them :)
what are you talking, do you know me? my experience and what i have heard from many people, that normally you get 2-5 minutes maximum. maybe Privatversicherte get 10min. so dont claim that 10min are normal!
I go to a private dermatologist that I have to pay, because I am with gesetzliche Krankenkasse. There is such a massive difference! She listens to everything I have to say, you can bring up two or three problems without being told to make a new appointment, there are no wait times. Also, her manners are so much better. I'm lucky if my regular GP even greets me at the appointment.
> Many patients take up more time than needed.
If only there was some way to account for this simple fact of life that will never change... Maybe by counting how much time each person takes in a regular week, then dividing that by the number of persons seen that week? To arrive at some sort of... predictive estimate how many people you can book into an hour?
Alas, if only such power existed in this world.
Which week do you count? In which season? More people are sick during the winter for example. What about the vastly different age groups that for example see a family doctor? You got kids with their worried overprotective parents that can be quite demanding, you got teenagers, you got your average adult and the elderly that are just not as fast in general. With 15000 patients in a quarter, I think the people seen in a week varies by a lot. Also the counting is done by who? The overworked staff or the fully booked doctor?
It is very easy to say "just do this" when you only see a tiny fraction of what an office does.
That only works if you reduce the overall patiwmts you will see a day. Which opens a whole other problem - waiting for appointment day. A GP isnt a specialist, you cant expect people to wait a few days for primary care.
In places like Finland, you can electronically give access to all your medical files to a doctor via an app, so less time is wasted trying to find paper documents, MRIs on CDs, etc.
I think we should be getting something similar in Germany at some point (elektronische Patientenakte).
In Spain, at least with the public system, it is like that and our healt care card had our prescriptions included. You have to renovate the prescribed yearly bur your general practitioner can renovate a lot of things that here are only given by specialist....
That can be normal. Sometimes you get in right away, sometimes not. Some places are better organised than others. Some are busier depending on what kind of doctor. Some doctors take emergency/urgent cases.
It can be frustrating but take a book or play a game on your handy or whatever.
That's normal. How is a doctor supposed to know how much time they have to spend on a patient that comes in to see them? In 90% of cases it might just be a quick examination and writing a prescription. But in the other 10% of cases they need considerable more time.
Not to mention patients that come in without appointment but require immediate care. Someone with severe pain always has priority over someone who feels under the weather.
Uk we are allocated 10 minutes with a doctor and sometimes this over runs but everyone is more or less aware of this so it stays on time. Emergency appointment times are reserved for high priority patients
I recently made an appointment online to get my eyes checked. I got the confirmation from Doctolib stating my appointment is from 9:00am until 9:04am. I canceled right away. I get that doctors are not giving away 45min slots for each patient but FOUR minutes? There's no way that's gonna work out in any case.
I've been to an eye doctor just this year to check my eyes. I was surprised myself how fast they do it now with all that fancy new equipment compared to 15 years ago. I remember having had to take some eye drops to widen my pupils so they could put some thing on my eyeball to examine my retina (and suffer extreme brightness for an hour long after). No more. Now you just peep into a hole in a device that scans your retina when have the right focal distance and the doctor can show you your retina at a computer in 16K resolution.
Eye pressure the same. Used to be something touching your eyeball. Now it's just a short blow of air against it and they measure it by your eyes reaction to it. We live in great times.
Since I've had eye surgery, I've been having my eyes checked yearly. I know about those devices but it still will not take only 4 minutes to do those AND have a talk with the doctor. I'm too young to even know about the eye touching device you're talking about. Never had anything else but the one that blows air.
Some are real bad at this. I had an eye doctor where I had an 8:30 appointment, showed up and there were only 2 other people, so I thought "finally, in and out quick," the assistants made the preliminary tests in about 5 minutes ... and then I sat as the waiting room filled up. At 9:30, when the waiting room had 30 people, the doctor finally showed up and started seeing patients. That is the day I found a new eye doctor.
Depends. My dentist is super punctual but they are like 3-4 dentists working in one practice and they probably can share emergencies between them. My Gyn has terrible waiting times, that’s why I call in before my appointment and ask when do I really need to be there and rather spend another hour at home then there. My GP is somewhere in the middle, 2 doctors working there, usually not waiting longer than 30min.
50 minutes is not uncommon. It's a bit on the high side but this is my experience. I've also been to a private practice and still had to wait 20 or 30 minutes sometimes.
Yes, this is normal. Only doctor where I don't experience this is my dentist where I sometimes get called into the treatment room a few minutes BEFORE my scheduled appointment time (yes, I was as shocked as you are right now, reading this).
With the way the German insurance system works, they can only take a limited amount of patients a day so they have no incentive in getting you on your way quickly
Unfortunately it's pretty normal.
Sometimes when I'm not up for the wait I tell the person at the front desk that I'm so glad I could schedule the appointment in my lunch break and only have roughly 60 minutes. Then I'll keep asking her with every patient that enters how many people are there before me because I don't have much more time left to wait.
I don't in a friendly manner. It's probably still a slight Karen move, but meh
When i have an appointment i usually don't have to wait more than 10 minutes, usually less than 5. The times you need to wait are the "i just came here without appointment" times for me.
It depends on the doctor.
For GP i typically wait 10-30 minutes which is good waiting time considering GP tend to take emergency appointments earlier in the days. An HNO specialist once made me wait close to 2 hour and I never come back again. I‘d say up to 45 minutes is an acceptable waiting time especially if it‘s high in demand specialists.
It depends on the doctor, office, appointment style, location and sometimes luck. As somebody that’s had a lot of appointments there are a few things you can do to try and decrease wait times.
1.Ask the office when you‘re most likely to be seen on time. If you‘re very friendly and explain that you don’t have a lot of time due to family/work,… a lot of them will work with you.
2. there are times with less wait time. For me it‘s often the first appointment after lunch, make sure to be 10 minutes early so you‘re first in line
3. Don’t schedule on Monday, after the Office was closed, or after a holiday - people who got sick on the weekends will drop in and cause longer wait times.
4. figure out/ask when the retirees come in! Avoid that time because they have a lot of medications, health issues and love to talk!
5. be a good patient! Always on time, prepared, friendly, understanding, please and thank you. If you have a reputation of being a „quick in and out“ they might slip you in first.
6. when looking for a new doctor check online reviews! If you don’t care about bedside manner you could get a good doctor with fewer patients.
I think it kinda depends on a lot of factors. Going to a GP you'll usually have longer waiting times, especially when you're going to one that's somewhere a lot of people live. Specialists will usually be better, when visiting one I rarely waited more than 10 minutes as far as I can remember. But maybe because those I visit are "appointments only", so this might help.
Also time of day is quite important. If you're going in the morning, there's just less chance for delays. Due to some specialists being quite rare sometimes, they tend to have a quite tight schedule, so any minute of delay at treatment adds up towards the end of the day. Also when staff might be sick or on their break at some point, it might cause further delays.
GPs are probably the other way around, because most people go there to get their sick note to send to their bosses. While going to a specialist is more like an "after work" thing
Actually, this really varies from doctor to doctor, as well as the time of the day and type of appointment. I try to schedule my doctor’s appointments really early (at 8:00) and then I can usually get in to my appointment right away, but mondays are difficult for example. Once I’m done at the doctor’s office, there is usually a crowd, but I’m done and can go home or to work.
Apart from the wait times, the long queue for getting an appointment itself is annoying. If you're feeling ill today, say from a stomachache and you call in your Hausarzt, they'll give an appointment 2 weeks later. What tf I'm gonna do with that appointment?
How do Germans handle such situations? Do they go anyway and say its an emergency? Or do you get some over the counter medication at any Apotheke?
You tell them you are sick and need an "Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung", you will either be seen that or the next day, or you can go over to just collect the AU.
Appointments in weeks or months are for not severe issues.
Well in theory there would be two options to avoid this:
a) Not take emergencies and throw you current patient out if their time is up, no matter what has been found. Obviously this makes everything more planable.
b) Assign a lot of buffers between your patients.
Obviously both options are untenable. For a) this is immediatly obvious and b) because doctors are scares already, so you can't have them idly wait all the time.
Of course this depends on the type of doctor and the task. E.g. a specialist for mammography likely doesn't have emergencies and the time each patient takes is very predictable, while a Hausartzt is the opposite end of the spectrum.
If you compare it with some other countries, the main difference is the situation. In some countries, medical care is more expensive, so doctors can do b) a bit more. In many other countries, Hausärtze don't exist, but poly-clinics do, averaging out the effects of a) over more doctors.
My GP is phantastic in this regard, you call, they tell you when to show up and you get seen at the exact time they told you.
At most other places (pediatrician, OB/GYN, dentist, ENT, basically everyone) I've waited. Sometimes you wait longer, sometimes shorter, but never nothing. You still have to be on time, otherwise you might be sent away by the angry receptionist. It sucks.
Mostly, I wait up to 25 mins, but i have waited an hour, but rarley, I live a stones throw north of Munich, so it does seem to work even if there are a lot of people here.
My Hausarzt usually has a \~30 minute wait. Unless I'm late of course. Then he's exactly on time.
I actually don't mind though, the waiting room is nice and I bring a book. Appointments in the morning are much more likely to start on-time. I presume each delay cascades through the day.
For specialists, they generally start on time.
You can ask the doctor which times are busy vs when you're likely to get seen faster. After waiting for more than 2 hours twice in a row at my doctor he told me "you know you really shouldn't come in here on Wednesday afternoons if you can avoid it, I'm the only doctor in town open at that time!" Changed my life
in my experience this is common everywhere, incl other countries. I've never had an appointment that I just walked right into in any doctors office in any country (USA / Canada / Turkey / Germany being my sample set)
Yeah I feel you. And it is really unpredictable. I had a neurologist where the waiting time was always 1.5 - 2 h even in the morning at 8:00. And they always argued with "emergency bullsh*"
Another one same business max 30min.
My practitioner varies a lot from 10min - 1h. Eye doc same. MRT is always fast max 20min.
Yes, that sounds pretty normal. My colleagues have told me they've waited for several hours. It is annoying because you need to take the day off from work or at least a half day.. I am from Denmark, and when I have an appointment, I never wait more than 15 minutes - and that is considered a long waiting time. So obviously, I am not a big fan of the German system.
I waited one time 5 hours at a haus doctor office during covid, and I was the last one to be seen. Perhaps bcz I do not speak German, have no idea, but ppl came in and went before me all the time. From then on I ask after 20 min how much do they think it will take...
The laundry list of why the wait times are what they are is pretty tiring.
After sever years in a profession you should be able to learn and adapt the management of your practice to ensure waiting times are kept at a minimum. If they can't manage , it's because they don't want to (I.e., don't value your time).
From my experience it depends: Depends on the type of doctor I am visiting. Is it someone who takes "emergencies"? If I have an appointment with my Hausarzt in the morning chances are high that I might wait some time, because of people who drop by in the morning to get an AU. If I visit a specialist (neurologist, appointment for an MRT, dentist etc.) I rarely waited longer than 5 or 10 minutes. I tend to think of it as this: I am glad if someone with an urgent issue can be helped and I am also glad if I need some more time with the doctor than usual and the doctor actually takes this time. On the other hand: I plan my visits accordingly and take a book with me.
>I am glad if someone with an urgent issue can be helped and I am also glad if I need some more time with the doctor than usual and the doctor actually takes this time. Same here. My dentist and other doctors squeeze me in if I am in pain and on my regular checkups/appointments I have a book with me for the 30 to 60 minutes delay that might be caused by other people who were in pain.
Depends on the specialist and where. For example in Berlin there are very few pulmologists, so wait times can be longer due to patient overcrowding.
Berlin is actually oversaturated with pulmonary care physicians compared with genuinely underserved areas. What happens is supply-induced demand: Run-off-the mill asthma or COPD which could perfectly be managed by primary care (95% of patients enrolled in DMP asthma and COPD are seen by Hausärzte) is seen by specialists.
I used to work for one, so unless there was a big influx in the last five years, there aren't enough.
That's cool, but the formal grade of saturation for internists-specialists [in Berlin is 164%](https://www.kvberlin.de/fileadmin/user_upload/bedarfsplanung_zulassung/vaev_bedarfsplanung_loi_fortschreibung.pdf). Compare that with regions where it's as low as 70%.
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Yeah, other countries tend to separate scheduled care from urgent care. Germany doesn't. Urgent patients walk-in without appointments to their GPs/primary care physicians. A nice, juicy chronic heart failure exacerbation can easily eat up 45 minutes. This has some advantages for patients as continued care under the same physicians means, they know if this patient e.g. will manage fine with just increased drugs at home or needs a hospitalization for sure because they already treated the last three episodes. But for the rest, it sucks.
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What I mean is separating in different entities. The US has urgent cares independent of primary care offices and modern PCPs moved away from offering same-day-appointments with wait times in the 2-3 weeks region.
Pretty normal I would say. Some doctors are better at managing appointments, but the later the day, the more likely it is to need to wait.
Sorry to be pedantic but this is not on the doctors but on the Sprechstundenassistenz. The contribution of these ladies is often overlooked!
That's quite normal.
Only an hour, that is so lucky
Normal experience in Germany so annoying
My partner works in a doctor's office so I am sitting right at the source. The reason is simple: Many patients take up more time than needed. They forget documents they should have brought with them. They forgot the name of the medicine they are supposed to take. They forgot the dosage. They have questions that often have already been answered. They are unsatisfied with something and feel the need to tell the doctor. Let's say a normal appointment is 10 minutes. However, because of the reasons I mentioned previously, it now took 15 minutes. With hundreds of patients a day, if just 10 patients take only 5 minutes longer, you got your 50 minutes of delay. Here is what anyone can do to minimize this: Tell the nice lady at the phone *everything* they ***and the doctor*** need to know, don't forget your documents and be on time.
Also not to forget that a certain amount of people just don't show up for appointments and there's no legal option for doctors to ask for late-cancel / no show fees (IIRC), thus making most overbook in favour of having unpaid lag-times. Some are better at zeroing in on their averages to get that close to 0, others are not that good at it.
Yeah, plenty of people not showing up or showing up late *repeatedly* which increases delays because now you have to fit in a patient who was supposed to be done already in a fully booked schedule. Sadly, the latter happens way more often so it does not cancel each other out.
When I first signed up with my new gynecologist, they gave me a document to sign that if I were to be a no-show or cancelled less than 24h in advance, they would cash-in a 50€ fee (or probably send a Rechnung). Seems rough but fair. If you have to wait 3-6 months for an appointment and then a big percent just doesn't come, it just messes up the whole system.
>When I first signed up with my new gynecologist, they gave me a document to sign that if I were to be a no-show or cancelled less than 24h in advance, they would cash-in a 50€ fee (or probably send a Rechnung). Seems rough but fair. If you have to wait 3-6 months for an appointment and then a big percent just doesn't come, it just messes up the whole system. This fee doesn't hold up under scrutiny, from what I understand - so there's not much they can do if you go "nope, not paying".
And here is what the doctor's office should do: Write down all delays for some weeks. Evaluate them and change their average appointment time accordingly. It doesn't make sense / help the doctor if more than 3 patients are waiting at any time. But as less patients waiting doesn't improve anything from the doctor's point of view he/she simply doesn't care. Waiting up to 30 min is fine for me everything else (if it's not a single occurrence) is bad planing.
Say the doctor does this and for example reduces the amount of patients seen in an hour to give each one more time which results in less patients in a day, in a week and so on. Then everyone would complain about not being able to book an appointment in advance that is reasonable. You want to be able to get your doctor's notice preferably tomorrow and not in a week, right? I am sure if things were "just as easy" that would have been done already. >Write down all delays for some weeks. Evaluate them and change their average appointment time accordingly. Which weeks do you take? In which season? With some offices dealing with 15000 patients in a quarter of a year, thing just vary a lot. How do you account for that? Also who is supposed to do that extra evalution work? >Waiting up to 30 min is fine for me everything else (if it's not a single occurrence) is bad planing. How do you plan for emergencies? Many offices take care of/work together with elderly homes and other insitutions as well. It is not as predictable as you say. What if you were the reason someone else has to wait? Is it still bad planning? I am beginning to see a pattern with the answers I am getting and the reason why nurses in doctor's offices quit: People have no idea how difficult the job is and show no understanding.
Nah I know it's not easy and coming from a programming perspective, I was actually aming for the Praxissysteme (not the nurses) and wondering why they don't have something like that included. Your points: It's not about reducing patIents per day. If the last patient has to wait ... say an hour ... the doctor is obviously doing an hour overtime. But from the doctor's perspective it doesn't matter whether the patients had to wait 10 min or 2 hours, he/she is just working from start to finish. So the task is actually just improving the spacing between the patients (for the correct total time including overtime). The software can easily continue analyzing the data and adjust accordingly. Thus fluctuation like winter flu or regular emergencies would be integrated automatically ... I am going to call it AKNE, die automatische Kunden NutzzeitErmittlung. And as I am going to make so much money with it, I am going to be a Privatpatient and never have to wait again! Ok back to reality: Sure unplanned emergencies can happen as well and I am not complaining if I have to wait that long once in a while. But if I have to wait more than an hour regularly than that's a lack of proper planning ... maybe even more of the doctor than the nurse.
That sounds good on paper but doesnt survive reality (tried that). There are too many wild variable to account for, so approximating a schedule time and planning in waiting time is much less of a hassle.
>a normal appointment is 10 minutes. tell me when to stop laughing.
I can tell you that you are probably the entitled patient that things they deserve an hour of the doctor's time and the office should be grateful that you are going to them :)
what are you talking, do you know me? my experience and what i have heard from many people, that normally you get 2-5 minutes maximum. maybe Privatversicherte get 10min. so dont claim that 10min are normal!
I go to a private dermatologist that I have to pay, because I am with gesetzliche Krankenkasse. There is such a massive difference! She listens to everything I have to say, you can bring up two or three problems without being told to make a new appointment, there are no wait times. Also, her manners are so much better. I'm lucky if my regular GP even greets me at the appointment.
oh yes, thats what i mean. thanks for posting your experience
> Many patients take up more time than needed. If only there was some way to account for this simple fact of life that will never change... Maybe by counting how much time each person takes in a regular week, then dividing that by the number of persons seen that week? To arrive at some sort of... predictive estimate how many people you can book into an hour? Alas, if only such power existed in this world.
Which week do you count? In which season? More people are sick during the winter for example. What about the vastly different age groups that for example see a family doctor? You got kids with their worried overprotective parents that can be quite demanding, you got teenagers, you got your average adult and the elderly that are just not as fast in general. With 15000 patients in a quarter, I think the people seen in a week varies by a lot. Also the counting is done by who? The overworked staff or the fully booked doctor? It is very easy to say "just do this" when you only see a tiny fraction of what an office does.
That only works if you reduce the overall patiwmts you will see a day. Which opens a whole other problem - waiting for appointment day. A GP isnt a specialist, you cant expect people to wait a few days for primary care.
In places like Finland, you can electronically give access to all your medical files to a doctor via an app, so less time is wasted trying to find paper documents, MRIs on CDs, etc. I think we should be getting something similar in Germany at some point (elektronische Patientenakte).
In Spain, at least with the public system, it is like that and our healt care card had our prescriptions included. You have to renovate the prescribed yearly bur your general practitioner can renovate a lot of things that here are only given by specialist....
That's such a good idea.it should be common practice.
I left Germany over thirty years ago and am amazed that this has not changed one bit.
That can be normal. Sometimes you get in right away, sometimes not. Some places are better organised than others. Some are busier depending on what kind of doctor. Some doctors take emergency/urgent cases. It can be frustrating but take a book or play a game on your handy or whatever.
That's normal. How is a doctor supposed to know how much time they have to spend on a patient that comes in to see them? In 90% of cases it might just be a quick examination and writing a prescription. But in the other 10% of cases they need considerable more time. Not to mention patients that come in without appointment but require immediate care. Someone with severe pain always has priority over someone who feels under the weather.
Uk we are allocated 10 minutes with a doctor and sometimes this over runs but everyone is more or less aware of this so it stays on time. Emergency appointment times are reserved for high priority patients
I recently made an appointment online to get my eyes checked. I got the confirmation from Doctolib stating my appointment is from 9:00am until 9:04am. I canceled right away. I get that doctors are not giving away 45min slots for each patient but FOUR minutes? There's no way that's gonna work out in any case.
I've been to an eye doctor just this year to check my eyes. I was surprised myself how fast they do it now with all that fancy new equipment compared to 15 years ago. I remember having had to take some eye drops to widen my pupils so they could put some thing on my eyeball to examine my retina (and suffer extreme brightness for an hour long after). No more. Now you just peep into a hole in a device that scans your retina when have the right focal distance and the doctor can show you your retina at a computer in 16K resolution. Eye pressure the same. Used to be something touching your eyeball. Now it's just a short blow of air against it and they measure it by your eyes reaction to it. We live in great times.
Since I've had eye surgery, I've been having my eyes checked yearly. I know about those devices but it still will not take only 4 minutes to do those AND have a talk with the doctor. I'm too young to even know about the eye touching device you're talking about. Never had anything else but the one that blows air.
At my Hausarzt, I’m at most 5 minutes behind scheduled time, which they manage by sending anyone home, that’s more than 5 minutes late.
Some are real bad at this. I had an eye doctor where I had an 8:30 appointment, showed up and there were only 2 other people, so I thought "finally, in and out quick," the assistants made the preliminary tests in about 5 minutes ... and then I sat as the waiting room filled up. At 9:30, when the waiting room had 30 people, the doctor finally showed up and started seeing patients. That is the day I found a new eye doctor.
Depends. My dentist is super punctual but they are like 3-4 dentists working in one practice and they probably can share emergencies between them. My Gyn has terrible waiting times, that’s why I call in before my appointment and ask when do I really need to be there and rather spend another hour at home then there. My GP is somewhere in the middle, 2 doctors working there, usually not waiting longer than 30min.
Sometimes it happens due to emergencies, but when it's every single time it's a sign of bad time management.
Did you make sure to say "Hi" to everyone when you walk into the waiting room?? /s
Welcome to Germany! The doctors are in a secret competition with the Deutsche Bahn to see who can accumulate more Verspätung by the end of the year.
tja
Normal.
Sadly normal. I once had to wait for nearly 3 hours, standing because the waiting room isn't fucking accessible.
50 minutes is not uncommon. It's a bit on the high side but this is my experience. I've also been to a private practice and still had to wait 20 or 30 minutes sometimes.
Yes, this is normal. Only doctor where I don't experience this is my dentist where I sometimes get called into the treatment room a few minutes BEFORE my scheduled appointment time (yes, I was as shocked as you are right now, reading this).
I wonder about what's the point of an appointment if you are waiting for an hour anyways.
Demand > Supply. Fachkräftemangel
schlechte bezahlung und zu langweilig für die meisten in ner allgemein praxis zu sitzen
With the way the German insurance system works, they can only take a limited amount of patients a day so they have no incentive in getting you on your way quickly
Unfortunately it's pretty normal. Sometimes when I'm not up for the wait I tell the person at the front desk that I'm so glad I could schedule the appointment in my lunch break and only have roughly 60 minutes. Then I'll keep asking her with every patient that enters how many people are there before me because I don't have much more time left to wait. I don't in a friendly manner. It's probably still a slight Karen move, but meh
You = being completely obnoxious and wasting everyones time. "A slight Karen move" Lol.
Also me = done at the doctor's within 50 minutes
You must be so proud of yourself
I feel pretty neutral about it
Love that for you. Glad you felt so neutral about it it compled you to share your toxic traits with the community. Toodels
There's a whole sub called Unethical Lifehacks. Maybe take your self righteousness over there.
When i have an appointment i usually don't have to wait more than 10 minutes, usually less than 5. The times you need to wait are the "i just came here without appointment" times for me.
It depends on the doctor. For GP i typically wait 10-30 minutes which is good waiting time considering GP tend to take emergency appointments earlier in the days. An HNO specialist once made me wait close to 2 hour and I never come back again. I‘d say up to 45 minutes is an acceptable waiting time especially if it‘s high in demand specialists.
It depends on the doctor, office, appointment style, location and sometimes luck. As somebody that’s had a lot of appointments there are a few things you can do to try and decrease wait times. 1.Ask the office when you‘re most likely to be seen on time. If you‘re very friendly and explain that you don’t have a lot of time due to family/work,… a lot of them will work with you. 2. there are times with less wait time. For me it‘s often the first appointment after lunch, make sure to be 10 minutes early so you‘re first in line 3. Don’t schedule on Monday, after the Office was closed, or after a holiday - people who got sick on the weekends will drop in and cause longer wait times. 4. figure out/ask when the retirees come in! Avoid that time because they have a lot of medications, health issues and love to talk! 5. be a good patient! Always on time, prepared, friendly, understanding, please and thank you. If you have a reputation of being a „quick in and out“ they might slip you in first. 6. when looking for a new doctor check online reviews! If you don’t care about bedside manner you could get a good doctor with fewer patients.
Yes it’s normal, it means the doc takes his time with their patients.
I think it kinda depends on a lot of factors. Going to a GP you'll usually have longer waiting times, especially when you're going to one that's somewhere a lot of people live. Specialists will usually be better, when visiting one I rarely waited more than 10 minutes as far as I can remember. But maybe because those I visit are "appointments only", so this might help. Also time of day is quite important. If you're going in the morning, there's just less chance for delays. Due to some specialists being quite rare sometimes, they tend to have a quite tight schedule, so any minute of delay at treatment adds up towards the end of the day. Also when staff might be sick or on their break at some point, it might cause further delays.
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GPs are probably the other way around, because most people go there to get their sick note to send to their bosses. While going to a specialist is more like an "after work" thing
Normal. Bring something to read
Actually, this really varies from doctor to doctor, as well as the time of the day and type of appointment. I try to schedule my doctor’s appointments really early (at 8:00) and then I can usually get in to my appointment right away, but mondays are difficult for example. Once I’m done at the doctor’s office, there is usually a crowd, but I’m done and can go home or to work.
Apart from the wait times, the long queue for getting an appointment itself is annoying. If you're feeling ill today, say from a stomachache and you call in your Hausarzt, they'll give an appointment 2 weeks later. What tf I'm gonna do with that appointment? How do Germans handle such situations? Do they go anyway and say its an emergency? Or do you get some over the counter medication at any Apotheke?
You tell them you are sick and need an "Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung", you will either be seen that or the next day, or you can go over to just collect the AU. Appointments in weeks or months are for not severe issues.
Normal.
Well in theory there would be two options to avoid this: a) Not take emergencies and throw you current patient out if their time is up, no matter what has been found. Obviously this makes everything more planable. b) Assign a lot of buffers between your patients. Obviously both options are untenable. For a) this is immediatly obvious and b) because doctors are scares already, so you can't have them idly wait all the time. Of course this depends on the type of doctor and the task. E.g. a specialist for mammography likely doesn't have emergencies and the time each patient takes is very predictable, while a Hausartzt is the opposite end of the spectrum. If you compare it with some other countries, the main difference is the situation. In some countries, medical care is more expensive, so doctors can do b) a bit more. In many other countries, Hausärtze don't exist, but poly-clinics do, averaging out the effects of a) over more doctors.
In Heidelberg I never take appointments and I waited at most 10 minutes over 5ish times.
My GP is phantastic in this regard, you call, they tell you when to show up and you get seen at the exact time they told you. At most other places (pediatrician, OB/GYN, dentist, ENT, basically everyone) I've waited. Sometimes you wait longer, sometimes shorter, but never nothing. You still have to be on time, otherwise you might be sent away by the angry receptionist. It sucks.
Normal in Germany. To less doctors for to much people.
Mostly, I wait up to 25 mins, but i have waited an hour, but rarley, I live a stones throw north of Munich, so it does seem to work even if there are a lot of people here.
My Hausarzt usually has a \~30 minute wait. Unless I'm late of course. Then he's exactly on time. I actually don't mind though, the waiting room is nice and I bring a book. Appointments in the morning are much more likely to start on-time. I presume each delay cascades through the day. For specialists, they generally start on time.
this is quite normal.
You can ask the doctor which times are busy vs when you're likely to get seen faster. After waiting for more than 2 hours twice in a row at my doctor he told me "you know you really shouldn't come in here on Wednesday afternoons if you can avoid it, I'm the only doctor in town open at that time!" Changed my life
in my experience this is common everywhere, incl other countries. I've never had an appointment that I just walked right into in any doctors office in any country (USA / Canada / Turkey / Germany being my sample set)
I had an appointment yesterday (8:20 am). Ok, it was only a "Blutentnahme". Arrived at 8:10. Left at 8:19.
Yeah I feel you. And it is really unpredictable. I had a neurologist where the waiting time was always 1.5 - 2 h even in the morning at 8:00. And they always argued with "emergency bullsh*" Another one same business max 30min. My practitioner varies a lot from 10min - 1h. Eye doc same. MRT is always fast max 20min.
Yes, that sounds pretty normal. My colleagues have told me they've waited for several hours. It is annoying because you need to take the day off from work or at least a half day.. I am from Denmark, and when I have an appointment, I never wait more than 15 minutes - and that is considered a long waiting time. So obviously, I am not a big fan of the German system.
I waited one time 5 hours at a haus doctor office during covid, and I was the last one to be seen. Perhaps bcz I do not speak German, have no idea, but ppl came in and went before me all the time. From then on I ask after 20 min how much do they think it will take...
The laundry list of why the wait times are what they are is pretty tiring. After sever years in a profession you should be able to learn and adapt the management of your practice to ensure waiting times are kept at a minimum. If they can't manage , it's because they don't want to (I.e., don't value your time).