Patient Patients

On a June morning in Union City, Georgia, staff started showing up at 6 a.m. for a building that had never held a patient. Grady Health System was opening a brand-new 24-hour emergency room with 16 beds, a pharmacy, a lab, and a pediatric unit, the first ER in south Fulton County in four years. Until that morning, the nearest one was almost 30 minutes away.

If you have never been inside an emergency room, here is how it works. An ER is the part of a hospital that is open all night for anything that cannot wait, from a broken arm to a heart attack. You check in at a desk, a nurse asks a few questions, and then you sit. The order is not first come, first served. The sickest person goes back first, so someone with chest pain who walked in after you will be seen before your sprained ankle, and nobody tells you where you are in line. The average visit in America now takes more than two and a half hours, and one woman on Long Island waited 36 hours in hallway after hallway until she got a bed.

A brand-new ER has one thing no old one has. Nobody has sat in its waiting room yet.

Your Task:

Imagine you are the patient-experience manager for the new ER, and the waiting room is yours to design. Most people who walk in have never been inside one, and they are scared.

1. The Wait
Think of a time you waited a long time for something, and it made you anxious or annoyed, when nobody told you what was going on or how much longer it would be. It could be the school office, the DMV, or a bus that never came. Say where you were, how long it took, and what about the waiting got to you. (3 to 4 sentences.)

2. The Flip
Take the thing that made your wait so bad and build its opposite into the new ER, for someone who has never been in one and is scared. It cannot be a number on a screen or anything a hospital already does. Give it a name, say what a first-timer notices about it in the first ten minutes, and say whether it costs almost nothing or real money. (4 to 5 sentences.)

3. The Welcome
Write what the person at the front desk says to every first-timer in the first twenty seconds, so they understand how the line works and feel like someone is watching out for them. (2 sentences.)

Optional: add a drawing of your waiting room if you want to. Please include a link. It is not required, and your writing has to make sense without it.

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