On my musculoskeletal placement i was constantly getting patients who would turn up late to their appointments. It happened so often that it became a bit of a running joke amongst the other students and myself. In all seriousness though, when do you say to a patient "sorry, but you are too late?".
Especially as students we want to do as good a job as possible with patients, so we want to do a thorough assessment and treatment with every patient. On a couple of occasions patients turned up to a 30minute appt with only 10 minutes remaining. Is it fair to ourselves or our patients to still treat them?
After a number of occassions running late for my following patients I decided that it was not fair on myself, or my other patients to continue treating patients when they arrive so late. It was a hard thing to do, because I felt terrible every time i had to turn a patient away (and it happened a number of times). However, I found that when I explained to patients that i would not have enough time to treat them properly due to their lateness they were usually very understanding. It is just another situation where as physios we need to learn to look after ourselves and do whats right by us... and our other patients!
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It can be very frustrating dealing with late patients. In India everyone ran on "Bengali time" which meant that if you said 2 oclock they could turn up any time in the afternoon. I think dealing with this sort of thing requires flexibility but at times you just have to tell the patient that they have missed their appointment. I think the difficult thing will be when we have to tell them that they're still going to have to pay for it.
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