NB: I just moved to a new state, and my previous doctor of 12 years had in-house phlebotomy. I do not recall this being so terrible 12 years ago, but also I was in another state.
In my new state, the first time I needed bloodwork, my doc said "just go to any Quest location." Okay, I try calling one to find out things like hours or whether I needed an appointment, and after 45 minutes on hold, I decided just to go down there and see if I could get bloodwork.
After wandering the halls of a smallish hospital (did their map say they were IN the hospital? No.) for a while, I finally find the small, hardly marked door for the Quest lab. I walk in. There is one person sitting in a chair, and a significantly older lady (I'd say past 85 y/o) wrestling with a tablet-screen-thing. No employees at all. No signage to indicate what I should do. So I wait. Eventually I realize that the lady is having real problems with the screen. I go over and offer help. Then I offer help again, as I realize she is a monolingual Spanish speaker. I'm bilingual, so I kinda think of it as an occasional civic duty to help those who are not. So, we're looking at the screen together, and THIS is when I realize that the screen is there in lieu of a human, and this is how you're supposed to "check in." Well, my little old lady friend has no more idea what's going on than I do and has been, as far as I can tell, hitting buttons at semi-random. She had gotten the screen localized into Spanish, which, yay, win for little old lady, but based on a long history of teaching English and writing, I'm gonna say with some confidence that it wasn't her language but her literacy that was preventing her from checking in. So, I ask her all the questions orally, and fill in her answers on the screen. When she's checked in and settled, I leave, never having seen a single sign of life. I hope little old lady got her bloodwork! Note that this location is in a small US city with a HUGE low-income immigrant population. Lack of English and low literacy are two ENTIRELY predictable situations.
I go to another one in the slightly more affluent town next door. Same. No humans. One screen. I go to another one in a medium income town. Same. No humans. Just screen. No instructions on the wall. No "ring here to talk to someone."
Finally, I have found the last refuge (or greatest crime) of having high literacy, access to a car, and research skills, and find a primary care physician who DOES employ in house phlebotomy. A year of calm, cheerful, and uneventful lab tests follow. Today I went to get blood drawn and the phlebotomist was out sick, so the office suggested another Quest location. Now we're in a FOURTH city. Same post-apocalyptic hellscape?!?@#(@*$&!!
How did this come about? Why is it allowed to continue? Is there an agency or someone to report to? It's like self-checkout in the supermarket, but 1) it's not optional (one can still generally find a checkout person in the grocery) and 2) it's about health and wellbeing, not whether your can of beans scanned right and 3) MOST people are not scared of grocery stores whereas a LOT of people are scared of needles, doctors, tests, etc. A non-anxious presence to get you through the system would be GOOD for healthcare! An anonymous tablet, a blank room, and no help or recourse... why? WHY???
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