No one likes being kept hanging around of course and we try to make our waiting rooms as comfy as possible. In fact, politically correctly I think they should be called reception areas or welcome lounges or some such.
Anyhow, recent research has come up with an astonishing revelation as to why magazines in such areas are often out of date; and dentists seem disproportionately the butt of these jokes. The reason is that patients are more likely to take the most recent issues! Now I bet no one ever thought of that, did they?
The study, in Auckland, had to be terminated after 31 days when all of the gossipy magazines had been taken and only old editions of publications like Time magazine remained. Practices hoping to save money by replacing magazines less often should provide old copies of non-gossipy magazines.
Meanwhile GP receptionists are being sent on customer care courses to stop them being rude to patients. The sessions are being trialled in 90 surgeries in Bradford following a surge in complaints from the public that they were being ‘patronised’ and
‘spoken to like idiots’. Of course they may just have been caught stealing the magazines.
Dentine with you fries?
It is always unfortunate when products, especially food, get contaminated with foreign bodies. Or in this case a bit of a foreign body. In Tokyo, McDonald’s has recently apologised publicly after a human tooth and other foreign items were found in its food. At a press conference, executives of the fast food group explained that customers had found various foreign objects in their food. One man had found a human tooth in his French fries and a child suffered an oral injury caused by a piece of plastic in his sundae. Great reassurance was given that their products are safe and that they are still investigating how the objects entered the food. I recall Mrs Lovett setting my mind at rest after I discovered a bit of denture in one of her delicious meat pies in the Fleet Street shop next to Sweeny Todd’s.
Just Shetland
Some years ago I was reprimanded by a reader for referring to The Shetland Isles, being informed emphatically that it (they) was/were just Shetland. So I have double checked this item to ensure that I create no such ire again.
It seems that Shetlanders (not the Shetlanders) face ‘years waiting to see a dentist’. New families setting up home in that part of the UK are anticipating a long wait for routine dental appointments as health chiefs attempt to tackle the lack of independent practices on the islands. More than 19,000 people from a population of 23,000 are registered for NHS treatment, but that is well above the number of patients the dentists currently operating can comfortably see. Nationally, Shetland has the lowest ratio of dentists per head of population.
Let’s hope that they at least have some up to date magazines to read while they’re waiting.