Published 15 July 2025

The waiting room is full, and I’m running late. I hear raised voices — a patient upset about the long wait. When he finally enters, he’s clearly frustrated. His appointment was for 8am. It’s now 11.

He waited three months to be seen. He first had to sit in the outside waiting room before being called in for observation. When I responded, “it must be frustrating to wait for so long”, he scornfully replies "who wouldn’t be".

No one explained the process. His blood results were never shared. A new antihypertensive was added without a conversation. Now he’s been without medication for two weeks.

His complaints are all valid.

We talk through his concerns. He’s not keen on taking medication — he says he smokes to relax. His blood pressure is high, his cholesterol worse. Still, he agrees to re-start the statin, to continue one antihypertensive. He’s not ready to quit smoking, and doesn’t want to return in three months. Six months, he says. The waiting is just too much.

When he leaves, something has softened.

We often meet patients who previously had access to private healthcare, but who now find themselves navigating a very different public system. Their frustration is real — but we can easily label them as “difficult” or “demanding”, or more cynically, “entitle-tees.”

At the same time, many other patients have adapted to the dysfunction. They are patient, even passive. And we tend to value this — it makes our job easier. But I wonder: have they simply become used to being overlooked? Has quietness become a kind of coping?

As healthcare workers, our frustration is valid too. It’s exhausting to absorb anger when you’re already stretched thin. But I’m learning not to see these reactions as personal attacks — rather, as the residue of a broken system.

What helps is remembering this: both the frustrated voice, and the quiet one, carry something important. They speak not just to personality, but to life experience, to expectation, to grief.

And perhaps our role is not to fix all of it — but to meet it with openness and a little more room.

There’s no easy answer. But naming the tension feels like a place to begin.