You know those signs at amusement parks that tell you how long the wait is for the big roller coaster? As it turns out, they tend to tell you the wait is a little longer than it’s really likely to be. That way, the chances are you won’t be disappointed when you finally do hop on board.
A group of Michigan doctors figured out that the same strategy makes patients feel better about their trip through the emergency room.
Basically, the docs calculated the mean time it took to get through the ER for a given test or procedure — then added 20% when they told patients what to expect. In a standard patient satisfaction survey, all nine variables related to wait times improved after the ER adopted this policy (the improvement was statistically significant for five of the variables).
The study was done at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan. Before it began, things were “completely willy nilly,” Russell Rae, Jr., the ER doc who led the study, told the Health Blog. “Some doctors told people how long it would take. Some doctors said nothing.”
We can see that it makes sense to tell patients something — but isn’t it unethical to give an inflated estimate? “We had to pick a time,” Rae said. “We felt like if we were providing people with the exact mean time, half of the time we’d be underestimating how long its going to take,” Rae said.
The findings were presented this week at the American College of Emergency Physicians meeting in Chicago.
Once the project ended, Rae said, there was still pretty wide variation in what doctors told patients about how long things would take. So now there are signs up on the ER walls that tell patients how long they can expect to wait for various procedures. The estimates — blood test, an hour and a half; CT scan with contrast, four hours; ultrasound, five to six hours — are 20% above the mean, Rae said.
More on ER waits: Another study presented at the ER docs’ meeting found out just how long patients are willing to spend in the ER. Read about it here. (Our most attentive readers will notice that both ER studies come from hospitals in the Beaumont group in Michigan. It’s purely a coincidence.)