Designing for the fifteen-minute appointment

Nobody in this process controls the length of the appointment. It is set by a rota, a contract and a waiting room, and no amount of preparation adds a minute to it. What preparation changes is the proportion of those minutes spent on reconstruction.

A typical consultation opens with several minutes of re-establishing the situation: what has been happening, when it started, what changed. That work is necessary and it is being done from memory, out loud, under time pressure, by the person least equipped to summarise it.

I brought one page. We started at the actual question about four minutes in instead of eleven.

Illustrative composite

The result people describe is not a better relationship or a different decision. It is a longer middle — more of a short appointment spent on the thing the appointment was for.