Waiting Room as an Information Ground
Doctors, pharmacies, and dental offices have waiting rooms where many patients wait before receiving care. Any waiting room can be a potential information ground if we minimize obstacles that stop people from exchanging information while waiting. By encouraging communication, we can make waiting rooms more relaxing and inviting places and reduce patient anxiety while waiting for medical care. Specialized clinics may be a special information ground because people there have something in common by the virtue of being there.
Many waiting rooms have windows, fish tanks, small fountains, plants, or art to create a relaxed atmosphere in the room. In a cozy waiting room patients can not only talk to one another but can also talk to the receptionist who can be a useful source of information. There are a number of factors that encourage or discourage the use of a waiting room as an information ground, the size of the room, what seating is available and how it is arranged, and whether there is a television or magazines in the waiting room. In a too large room, patients can sit so far away from one another it is almost impossible to share information. A shared seating space like a couch is more likely to encourage people to sit next to one another and talk. In addition, providing distractions such as a television or magazines hinders communications and patients never have to make eye contact with anyone in the room.
In a medical or dental office patients can talk to each other and usually will end up sharing information with each other. Often the receptionist starts conversations when people come up to check in or ask the receptionist questions about their appointment or their care. Different types of information are shared in a doctor’s office. What people often want to talk about are their medical conditions or difficulties in their lives. They want to share their frustrations about having to leave work early to make the appointment and brag about the fact that they will end up coming home early. Different people will want to talk about different things and get help for different aspects of their lives. Some people just want someone to listen to them. However, in almost all conversations people end up sharing experiences and exchanging useful information with each other.
Incidents of information sharing occur because people are in close proximity of one another for prolonged periods of time. Even with our culture of privacy we have a tendency to want to talk to one another. There is also safety in talking to a stranger, we can share more with them because they do not know anything about our lives and we do not have to share anything we do not want to share.
What happens if there are toys in a waiting room and there is more then one child waiting? Eventually the children will end up playing together and talking. It is partly because they have less inhibitions then adults, but it is also because they share a common interest that encourages them to interact with one another. So maybe we can do something to encourage patients in waiting rooms to communicate with one another and encourage the use of waiting rooms as information grounds?
We can go back to those three factors described above that encourage information sharing. Another idea is to provide games or interactive activities for adults to do while they wait, games that someone can play alone but also encourage others to participate. We can also use technology to inform patients and encourage sharing of information. It would be interesting to see if computer information kiosks where patients can see their appointments or look up health information can be used to encourage collaboration between waiting patients and enhance communication and information sharing.
So can we give adults in most waiting rooms something in common to encourage them to communicate with each other? I think a small ethnographic study of each type of waiting room can help us design better waiting rooms. Some ideas for enhancements are creating shared spaces between seating, like a table with flowers on it. We can also use sculptures, paintings or other decorations to encourage sharing of opinions. It is also quite obvious that different types of waiting rooms would need different enhancements to increase communication. An emergency room waiting room would have a much different atmosphere then your physician’s office or a cancer care center.
Anna Stolyar, Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI), UW School of Medicine