Communicate Creatively With Your Patients In The Waiting Room

What would you tell a patient when he has to wait an extra hour for his appointment? How do you address the situation when a patient is not allowed to leave unattended children in the waiting room when he goes in to see the doctor? Interactions between patients and Optometry staff in the waiting room can sometimes be challenging. Some situations render the interaction not optimal either for the patient or for the staff. Those situations are not very common but when they happen, especially in a crowded practice, it may cause a frustrating and uncomfortable experience. In those situations where the interaction may become paralyzed, communication and listening skills play a major role to get things done in a smooth and efficient way.

There are many ways that staff employ to inform patients about the office guidelines some are pleasant and some are unpleasant tactics trying to get patients to comply using a manipulative request or sometimes a bullying way. A creative way to communicate straight-to-the-point and personalized messages without letting anyone around notice consists of a few words written on a sticky note. 

Attaching a sticky note is a tiny nuance that adds a personal touch to communicating a message but it also turned out to be one of the best ways to get someone to comply with your request. This has been demonstrated by a set of experiments by Professor Randy Garner at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville that revealed the effect of sticky notes bring about impressive results when they are employed to add a personal touch and make someone feel like you’re asking a favor of them (and not just anyone).

It appeared to Garner that a sticky note represents many powerful behavioral triggers all in one little object. A sticky note is a one-to-one message that gets the person’s attention first, is hard to ignore, is personalized, and does not match the environment where it is placed and the brain wants to accomplish it n order to take it out of its place.

A sticky note can be employed if you want to ask a patient to fill out a survey. In fact, Garner’s experiment was to find out what was necessary to make fellow university professors at the university comply with completing often lengthy and tedious surveys, using only interoffice mail as the conduit of communication.