Pitfalls in the waiting room

They say never work with children or animals, but I suspect whoever said that didn’t have much of a career in veterinary medicine (or as a paediatrician, come to think of it). In any case, they’re wrong – animals are the easy part.

Instead, the question that crosses my mind as I take sink into the sofa with my longed-for glass of wine is this: why on Earth did I choose a career that has so much interaction with the general public?

People are strange

People are infinitely varied, which is why life is so rich and exciting. Unfortunately, they’re also infinitely weird – myself included – and much of the stress of consulting has nothing to do with veterinary medicine.

Strange things can happen in a consulting room, which university training is poorly equipped for us to deal with, from extracting a toddler’s hand from a clinical waste bin to dealing with a spousal argument that’s been brewing for 15 years, or inadvertently discovering, in front of a horrified son or daughter, the allegedly 18-year-old rabbit you’re examining has, in fact, been secretly replaced three times by the parent.

For me, the problems begin before I get the client and their pet into my room. I am talking, of course, about the dreadful minefield known as the waiting room.

Practice imperfect

Although it’s impersonal, I am always filled with envy at my local doctor’s automated system: your name and a room number flashes up on the TV when your waiting is over.

I have never worked with such a system; it has always been my unhappy task to walk into the waiting room and announce my next victim, and I quickly learned even this seemingly simply job is a path strewn with danger. How, exactly, do you call your client in?

A number of options are available, all of which I have seen used by colleagues – and I have tried myself. Just as with cruciate repairs, many options exist because none of them are perfect, otherwise we’d all go with that one.

Here are the options as I see them:

1. The “Boarding School” approach

This technique involves calling out the client’s surname only: “Smith!”

It’s a technique seemingly preferred by vets who take a more paternalistic approach to the clients, and doesn’t sit so well with me. It always seems a little brusque and slightly rude (even when tempered with the “Smith, please” variant), and not only that, it always puts me in mind of Rowan Atkinson’s classic schoolmaster sketch from the Secret Policeman’s Ball (“Nibble? NIBBLE! Leave Orifice alone!”), and, while that isn’t generally a bad thing, it’s not necessarily conducive to good medicine.

2. The “Bank Manager” approach

A variant on the first option, this is, at first glance, a most sensible and reasonable option, which involves simply saying “Mr Smith”, “Mrs Smith” or “Miss Smith”. Less formal, but still professional, and I used this approach for a while.

However, there is a big disadvantage – the person who registered the animal is not necessarily the person who is bringing the animal in, but most practice software nowadays just lists the waiting clients in the originally-registered form. Calling out “Mrs Smith” hopefully in a waiting room, only to have a huge-bearded man in motorbike leathers stand up and walk towards you leads to a moment of social awkwardness of such magnitude that, being a true Englishman, I would actually rather die than experience for even a quarter of a second.

3. The “One of the Family” approach

This strategy involves referring to animals as if they’re any other member of the family: “Tiddles Smith!”

On the face of it, this seems like the ideal approach – a perfect compromise between the formality of approaches 1 and 2, and the chumminess of approach 4 – it’s also how we generally refer to patients behind the scenes. I was a fan of this method for a long time.

Unfortunately, it occasionally seems to produce a strange response in the waiting clients – a look of bemused amusement, a glance at each other which seems to suggest “oh, how silly”, and occasionally downright confusion (“Well, I mean I suppose you could call him that…”). The reaction, although uncommon, is uncomfortable enough it eventually soured me to this approach, and made me a fan of the final approach.

4. The “We’re all Friends Here” approach

Favoured by vets, like me, who feel their main job is to put the animal and their client at ease, this technique is simple: “Tiddles!” – or, more commonly, because we’re that sort of vet: “Tiddles, please!”

It’s friendlier than the first option, leads to less strange looks than the third option, and establishes the tone of your consultation quickly. However, it’s not without its drawbacks either.

Firstly, some names are sillier than others – it just doesn’t feel right walking out into a waiting room and shouting “Boo!” at a client – but, just occasionally, you come across an animal with such a ridiculous name it feels like an act of career suicide to shout it in a packed waiting room.

It may have seemed like a good idea to call your cat Heironymus Bosch III when you took him home from the shelter, but it doesn’t seem so much fun when it’s exposed to a roomful of people with cats called Sooty.

Here are a few names I have avoided calling out over the years: Sweetie Darling, Baby Girl, Honey (all for similar reasons), Henry Whiteballs, His Dark Majesty, Noisy Bugger and Shithead.

‘Bouquet, if you please’

The second problem is what I call the “Hyacinth Bucket” pitfall – the name that is either unpronounceable or has a variety of different pronunciations, the correct one of which you are absolutely guaranteed not to pick when you call the name in the waiting room, despite having a desperate conference with vet and nurse colleagues out the back before you risk it.

Clients take particular offence to you pronouncing their delightful cat Louis’ name as “Loo-is” rather than “Loo-ee” when they have patiently explained it to you the last time they came in, three months and a thousand consultations ago.

As an experienced vet, when I see problems like this on the horizon, I immediately abort to option 1, hoping the surname wasn’t originally written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and trying to put thoughts of Rowan Atkinson from my mind.

One way or another, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong just getting a client and their companion into the consulting room. If you’re reading this as a client then try not to judge your vet too harshly if they stumble in the waiting room, and bear in mind, while I agree that Vexorg, Destroyer of Worlds is an awesome name for a guinea pig, spare a thought for us – and let us know that it’s okay to call him Vex when it’s his time to come and see us.