Why waiting rooms feel longer than they are
Nobody enjoys a waiting room. But two waits of the same length can feel completely different, and the difference is almost never about the clock.
An uncertain wait feels longer than a known one. Being told “about twenty minutes” makes twenty minutes tolerable; being told nothing makes ten feel like an insult. An unexplained wait feels longer than an explained one. A wait alone feels longer than one in company. An unoccupied wait feels longer than one where you have something to do. And a wait that feels unfair, when someone who arrived after you goes in first, feels longest of all.
These are old findings from queuing research, and they explain something odd about healthcare: satisfaction with a clinic tracks the experience of waiting far more closely than the number of minutes. Two practices with identical waits can sit at opposite ends of a rating scale.
Which means a lot of the fix is cheap. A screen with your position in the queue. A sentence about why the delay happened. A realistic estimate rather than an optimistic one. None of these shorten the wait. All of them shorten how long it feels.
When we ask patients what they will trade for a shorter wait, the answers are often large. It is worth remembering that some of that value can be delivered without a single extra appointment slot, by changing the waiting rather than the wait.
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