Are full waiting rooms sacred gatherings?

During the Ultimate Blogging Challenge, my blogger friend Jeanine over at Inner Goddess Awakening wrote a post in which she presented a mindfulness book and six second solutions on how to take mindfulness breaks throughout the day in order to get centered. 

So far so very good :-)

One of the recommendations was to repeat a mantra every hour or so, and the abbreviated quote was 

I'm shifting this experience with my Spirit Breath.
I remember who I am now.
This (grocery store line, bumper-to-bumper traffic, full waiting room) is a sacred gathering.

In my comment I promised to write a post about why I refused to buy a self-help book / do breathing exercises / use mantras on "this full waiting room is a sacred gathering".

So here goes. There's not many things that annoy me as much as full waiting rooms, and I think they're anything but sacred gatherings.

Photo Credit: Derek Finch on Unsplash

They are a result of

• Shortage of skilled workers. Yes, GP practices are chronically overloaded, so much so that you have to  consider yourself lucky to even be accepted as a patient and get an appointment.
• Because so many people don't have a GP - or perhaps don't even bother to see one - the waiting rooms in the emergency centers are also chronically overloaded with patients who are clearly not emergencies. These patients are then referred to GPs for follow-up treatment, and I suspect they are not allowed to be turned away. 
• Some doctors believe that their time is more valuable than that of their patients. The mere fact that patients are not seen as customers could fill another blog post. To ensure that they have no idle time, two or three people are deliberately scheduled for the exact same time. The not-so-small print says that if you as a patient miss an appointment or cancel it less than 24 hours in advance, you have to pay for it. Who pays for my time that I keep spending unused in a full waiting room? I had to take time off work to attend this appointment!
• Even if it is clear that someone has, say, a respiratory problem, the official health insurance process requires the GP to make a formal referral to a pulmonologist. To do this, the patient must first get and keep a GP appointment. What a waste of resources. 
• Same goes for "doctor's notes" that employers demand in order to claim insurance benefits.
• For cost reasons, many small GP practices are not equipped to make conclusive diagnoses. Blood samples have to be sent to external laboratories, or patients have to be referred to specialized practices for MRIs or X-rays. In order to discuss these results, you have to come back for an appointment with your GP. "Telephone appointments" have not worked in the past. Either they weren't kept at all, or the doctor called at some point when it was convenient for them, but not for me, and certainly not at the agreed time.
• Fellow patients often think a waiting room is public all-purpose place where one may make lengthy phone calls, eat snacks (bonus point if they're smelly), watch videos with the volume on. 

I could go on with my rant. Instead I want to point out that there are rare exceptions. Both, my dermatologyst and my gynocologist, who happen to be women, have a very smooth and efficient patient flow. I asked myself if there are proportionally more dermatologists and gynecologists than general practitioners in Switzerland?

The internet is a great place. It provided a current statistic on physicians with main specialty in the practice sector (as opposed to hospital) by main specialty.

So in my state, which consists in 711k citizens, roughly 1,200 adults have to share one GP/internal medicine doctor. Now wait for it... 3,000 women share one gynocologist!!! Of course the guys don't like to see a urologist. that's why they don't mind being one in 15,000 patients per office.

So what is it with the GP's? Are they a victim of bureaucracy?  What do you think? 

And for the sake of this post's title: do you think full waiting rooms are sacred gatherings?