Nobody likes waiting. But when you’re awaiting life-changing health outcomes, those waits can be particularly harrowing.
Providing uplifting entertainment to your patients via their medical office waiting room tv is one way to help alleviate their stress and anxiety. This is done by using audio-optional content such as Atmosphere’s 40+ channels.
Educating Patients
Patients often experience great anxiety when they visit a medical facility. They may feel overwhelmed by the sterile environment and the prospect of a life-changing diagnosis or surgery. To make the waiting process less stressful, doctors’ offices and hospitals can use digital signage to communicate patient wait times, provide a sense of control, and offer entertainment options.
Uncertain, unexpected, and uncommunicated wait times make patients feel frustrated and dissatisfied. Digital signage in your waiting room helps reduce these feelings by displaying accurate estimated wait time information that is constantly updated to keep you up to date.
On-screen entertainment also takes patients’ minds off the wait and decreases stress. Upbeat and enjoyable content can relax patients’ nerves and help them to focus on a positive aspect of their visit, such as the fact that they are getting better.
The right media, such as AtmosphereTV can promote a healthy lifestyle and build a positive connection with your staff. This can be done by showcasing staff introduction videos that show your team’s professional qualifications and skills in a way that is engaging for patients. A queue management system also allows clinical staff to call patients for their appointments, making the service more efficient.
Some medical waiting rooms provide iPads tethered to the furniture, which patients can use as they wait. These devices help patients be productive and reduce stress by allowing them to work, play games, or browse social apps. Some practices even use this opportunity to advertise their services and products.
Keeping Patients Relaxed
Patients enter the healthcare space already, shouldering a substantial stress load. They may struggle with financial hardship, workplace issues, or family problems. Meanwhile, healthcare staff are managing their own personal and professional stresses. A typical waiting room is a stressful environment, and that’s not good for anybody.
Medical practices can ease the burden on patients and staff by providing a comfortable waiting space that is not overcrowded with people who do not know each other. They can offer various seating options, such as movable couches, clusters of chairs around a coffee table, a quiet area, and even children-friendly spaces to give each patient the privacy and comfort they need.
Television is a common addition to the waiting room for walk-in clinics. But while TVs are great for engaging the audience and reducing boredom, some media broadcasts can be stressful and contribute to mood unity. A study found that watching negative news can rapidly induce anxiety in the viewer.
To prevent this from happening, a hospital’s waiting room can choose visually soothing content, like nature footage or even an art gallery. This helps the patients relax and feel less anxious. Additionally, they can educate their viewers about how to sustain good health by showing educational videos on a playlist that is cycled regularly.
Filtering Out Harmful Content
When watching entertainment in medical waiting rooms, patients should avoid consuming content that could lead them to unhealthy or dangerous behavior. For example, watching pornography or disturbing videos can harm a patient’s mental health and lead to substance abuse or violent behaviors. Those who are sensitive to these risks should use a variety of strategies to avoid such content.
In addition to being a place of social distaining and different practices, hospital waiting rooms have complex communication ecologies. As such, they can cause varying stress levels among people who enter them. This study investigates four components of a waiting room’s communication ecology to illustrate how design decisions – often unintentionally – can impact people unequally and perpetuate health inequities.
Parrish-Sprowl et al., 2020 demonstrate that small changes in the communication ecology of a waiting room can have an enormous impact on how stressed patients are during their wait for a doctor’s appointment. These findings are important because they reframe how healthcare facilities think about waiting areas and show that health equity is possible even in low-resource settings. This research also focuses on the interplay between communication and health and how health is shaped and maintained.
Keeping Patients Engaged
Waiting for an appointment at a doctor’s office or government agency can seem endless for many patients. They want entertainment to help pass the time and keep them relaxed. Using a smart TV allows medical centers to stream quality content that can keep patients entertained and relaxed before their visit.
Many media options for patients to watch in a medical waiting room may not be a good choice. News programs, soap operas and talk shows are not conducive to a calming, healing environment, especially for children. A health center in Michigan recently made headlines for banning Fox News from its waiting rooms because it does not promote the Affordable Care Act and does not align with the institution’s mission.
Using digital signage in the hospital waiting room can effectively share important information with your patients. Adding a queue management system allows healthcare providers to prioritize and process patients quickly, making the wait less of an issue.
Using a playlist that includes nature media and other calming content on the hospital’s waiting room TV can help to relax the patient and make them feel more at ease before their visit. This content can include nature footage, animals, or other calming images to help make the patient more comfortable.