Observing the Outpatient-Waiting Experience in a Day Hospital Setting: Qualitative Exploration

Abstract

The space-time design of hospital care services is still an underdeveloped topic in sociological and medical literature. The article explores the social affordances inscribed in the space-time design of a hospital outpatient waiting room in relation to people care engagement and emotional comfort. The aim is to extend considerations to the broader context of relational and person-centered care. Observations employed of participants in the field study have a two-fold focus. One is ‘waiting’ for a service or a person, and the other is ‘expecting’ something or someone from a service. ‘Multisensory-scape’ and ‘Self-less subject’ are two metaphors I have adopted to describe the in field patient waiting experience. In the first case, people’s perception of hospital staff seeing and hearing them is central to observation in the care path. The second case is instead the result of people feeling a loss of identity when there is a time-mismatch between daily life routines and hospital organization rules. It is fundamental to consider the impact on people’s waiting experience because citizens and patients trace their feelings of ‘being taken into charge’ and ‘continuity of care’ back to the emotional comfort experienced the first moment they accessed the space-time design of hospital services.