Neglected spaces: UK general practice surgery waiting rooms

Gary Clapton; Lesley Reid

doi:10.3399/bjgpopen17X100641

Intended for Healthcare Professionals

Introduction

Every day GP surgery waiting rooms are used by thousands of people, yet the experience of waiting and the nature of the waiting rooms in these surgeries has been neglected as a subject for critical attention. This article reports on a unique photographic research project conducted with GP waiting rooms as the research subject.

The literature

Using the key phrases ‘healthcare’ and ‘waiting rooms’, and discounting those studies that addressed issues such as length of waiting times, the following databases were searched: CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature), Embase, Health Management Library, HMIC (Health Management Information Consortium), and PubMed. An iterative process was used to select 24 studies that were concerned with the way patients were affected by their surroundings while they waited to see a GP. Although not comprehensive, this literature search has found a broadly representative sample of the existing writings, the points of which are summarised below.

Few people look forward to waiting¹and therefore the acknowledgement of patient anxiety and the value of stress-reducing ‘positive distractions’ is frequent. Positive distractions include views of nature, music, and visual art.² It is argued that perceptions of the quality of care taken over the appearance of a waiting room can be a proxy for care taken over a patient’s health^3,,4and the literature has addressed seating arrangements,¹smell,⁵decoration,⁶with a view to conveying a sense of ‘homeyness’ that that according to Goelitz and Kahn⁷‘helps the space feel more like a living room’. Dilani⁸sums up this approach by suggesting the adoption of a ‘salutogenic’ approach to health waiting spaces which focuses on ‘the factors that keep us well, rather than those that make us unwell’.