CHAPTER VI
RECEPTION OF OFFICE PATIENTS
To the physician who prefers to do a strictly office practice, making few or no professional forays into the country, well located, neatly furnished, attractive quarters are a necessity. Three rooms will be sufficient for a start. These should include a reception room, waiting parlor, and doctor’s private office.
Size is not so important as location and furnishings. The quarters should be in a modern building of high-class reputation as to the character of its tenants. If the arrangement is such as to give an entrance into the doctor’s room from the waiting parlor, and an exit into another hall, it is preferable. This will make possible the separation of the callers the doctor has seen from those who are still waiting, and this prevents a lot of talk which may have a harmful tendency.
People, especially men, waiting to see a physician are apt to get into conversation with one another. When there is only one door serving as entrance and exit to the private office, and a caller, after seeing the physician, has to come back into the waiting parlor in order to get out there is a temptation to stop for a few moments and chat with those who are still waiting. In this way much harm, particularly in the matter of fees, may be done.
It is poor policy to give people a chance to exchange confidences. They will tell each other their opinion of the physician, the amount of the fees, etc. If these latter do not agree in amount it causes jealousies and distrust, and it becomes difficult in many cases for the physician to explain to the satisfaction of Mr. Brown why he should be charged a larger fee than Mr. Jones.
Under the best of conditions there will be too much of this sort of thing, but it may be greatly reduced by an arrangement of the rooms which will admit of callers being taken into the doctor’s office at one door and shown out at another. In one instance the waiting room of a certain specialist was crowded when one of the callers came out from the office after an interview.
“Are you going to take the treatment,” was the question put to him by one of those with whom he had been talking before he had seen the doctor.
“Not much,” was the answer in a loud tone. “That man’s a robber. He wanted $500 for the treatment.”
This frightened away a number of men nearly all of whom would have been good for $100 apiece when interviewed by the doctor under proper conditions. But they left without seeing him; actually scared off by the talk of the dissatisfied caller.