Don't Get Sick in Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is a beautiful island and a magnificent place to live. That is, until you get sick, or at least until you need to visit a doctor.

And it is not because Puerto Rico has no good doctors or lacks of them. It is just that they don't seem to care about the patient time, as if it was not valuable at all.

Anybody in Puerto Rico knows that visiting a doctor is a task that will take from a couple of hours up to a full day. And this is for a scheduled appointment.

The typical Puerto Rican doctor would not give fixed appointment to its patients. Rather, their secretary would tell you to come at a given time and then patients are accepted by the old "first-come, first-serve" method.

Once I had to visit a doctor for a routine check. Called his number, was told I should come on a Tuesday 8:00 am, and that all patients were being cited at that time, then the doctor would see them in the order they arrived.

I arrived to the doctor's office at 7.45 am, and was disappointed to notice I was number eight in line. At that point, I thought I would be there until 10.00 am or so. I just couldn't understand why wasn't it possible for the doctor to give appointments to each of us every fifteen minutes. I mean, it was obvious that he couldn't see eight patients at a time, so in that way we shouldn't be wasting our time.

Well, not only did he not do that, but worse, time passed by, it was 10.00 am and still no news from the doctor. And of course, we were left to stand on the hallway. Did it matter we had jobs? Not to our beloved doctor.

I was about to leave when someone at the line said "same old thing, yesterday he came in at 10.30 am", so I stayed. And there he came, calm as if it were dawn. As if he was doing as a favor, or was such an eminence...

You can bet I asked him, after he finished checking me (of course), why he would do such thing. First, he tried to lie saying his daughter had a car accident. I asked her if she had had another one the day before... he did not answer just looked downed, maybe thinking on his Hippocratic Oath.

I swear to myself I wouldn't come back to his office again. I couldn't understand why people would still see this physician. Unfortunately, later on I realized every single one of them do exactly the same thing. Well, unless the part where they don't give you an appointment.

So, being a CPA, I started to paying attention on how much time I and my colleagues spend going to a doctor's appointment. A person would spent from two to four hours every time he/she goes to the doctor. Times the ten to twenty times in a year one goes. Times all people working in Puerto Rico. You can only imagine the productivity wasted.

And it is not only doctors don't care (shame on them), I wonder why the governmental Agency that calls itself Defense of the Affairs of the Consumer does nothing about it. It is a service, we are paying high dollars for it, and we are being scammed by people that promises we will receive it promptly, when they know we won't.

I have lived in a so-called third-world-country, and never had to wait more than 30 minutes on a doctor's appointment. And that was if I went without an appointment.

How does it work? Well, in case a PR doctor reads it, I will explain the complex system: you give an appointment every fifteen minutes (or the average it takes you to check on a patient), stick to your schedule (forget about reading the newspaper, calling your buds, or getting out for a mid-morning breakfast) and make people respect it as well.

You may be making a little less money, but at least you are fulfilling your oath. Because patients have patience, but their time is valuable too. Remember, we are people.