5 Hours in the Queue to see Doctor: Why the Ghana Health Service Needs a Reality Check

I work in patient experience. It's my job to sit in meetings and tell hospital management why the little things matter, why a patient's time is not a small thing, and why “we were busy” is not an answer. Last week, I got to experience all of it from the other side, as a patient. And honestly, it was a bad experience wrapped inside a good one.

I got to the Ledzokuku Municipal Assembly (LEKMA) Hospital at 10:30 am. I was seen at 3:30 p.m.

Five hours!
And here's the confusing part: the doctor I eventually saw was lovely. Calm, polite, clinically competent. If you judged the visit only on those fifteen minutes in the consulting room, you'd say it went fine. But the visit wasn't just those fifteen minutes. It was the whole five hours before it and what happened after I sat down.

One Doctor, Then Two, Then None

When I got there, it was one doctor on duty. Later, a second one joined, and for a bit, the queue actually started moving. Then, just like that, both of them closed for the day, and everyone still in the queue, myself included, had to wait for the afternoon shift to arrive.

Nobody explained this to the people waiting. No announcement, no update, nothing. You just noticed the queue had stopped moving and slowly figured out why on your own. A few minutes later, the afternoon doctors arrived, and things picked back up. But by then, a room full of people had already spent hours doing nothing but wait, wondering if anyone was going to say anything at all.

“You Don't Need to Choose a Place Where a Lot of People Are”

When I finally got into the consulting room, I mentioned, politely, that I had been waiting a long time. That's the response I got.

“You don't need to choose a place where a lot of people are.”

I genuinely think it was said casually, not to be unkind. But sit with it for a second. After five hours, what a patient hears in that sentence is: if you don't like it, go somewhere else." That's not something a patient should walk away thinking, especially not from the very person who's supposed to be looking after them.

The Part Patients Outside Never See

Here's the part that stuck with me most. The doctor asked what was wrong, and I told him. Then, instead of moving straight into the consultation, he started chatting with the nurse in the room about something unrelated. Then he took a phone call. Then he was typing on his phone.

Was he rude about it? No. Was he still professional? Yes. But was that a good use of the time I'd waited five hours for? Not even close.

Meanwhile, patients were still sitting outside, complaining among themselves about the wait, having no idea that some of the time being “spent with the doctor” wasn't being spent on them at all. From the outside, it looks like the doctor is fully occupied, deep in patient care. From the inside, you realize part of that time is going to a phone call, a text, a chat with a colleague about last week's gist. Multiply that across every patient in a day, and you start to understand why the queue never really moves the way it should.

One Last Question

Before I left, I asked him one thing: if he also worked part-time at a private clinic, did patients there get the same experience he'd just given me?

He paused and asked me to explain what I meant. So I did, I walked him through everything: the five-hour wait, the comment about choosing quieter places, the chatting, the calls, and the phone. I wasn't trying to embarrass him. I was trying to make a point I make in my work all the time: competence and experience are not the same thing, and a system can have plenty of the first while badly failing at the second.

So, Was He Nice?

Yes. Very nice. Very professional.
Was the experience good? Not even close.

And that gap, between a good doctor and a bad experience, is exactly the problem. Patients rarely remember the name of the medicine they were given. They remember how long they waited, whether anyone spoke to them, and whether they felt like a person or a number in a queue. On that measure, the visit failed long before I ever sat down in front of a doctor.

A Wake-Up Call for the Ghana Health Service

I'm not writing this to attack healthcare workers. I know the pressure they're under. I know our public hospitals are understaffed and stretched thin, often doing more with less than anyone should have to. But being busy doesn't excuse a queue that stops moving with no explanation or a consultation where the patient's time takes a back seat to a phone call.

The Ghana Health Service has made real progress in getting people access to care. Now it needs to pay the same attention to what happens to people once they're inside the building, waiting for that care. Patient experience shouldn't be an afterthought or a soft, feel-good extra. It should be measured, tracked, and taken as seriously as any clinical outcome.

Because in the end, people don't remember every medicine they were prescribed. They remember how the system made them feel while they were waiting to be seen.

Priscilla Mhame Twebah Aikins is a Patient Experience Manager who works with hospitals and health systems to close the gap between clinical quality and how patients actually experience care.

LinkedIn: Priscilla Mhame Twebah Aikins
Email: prisaikins@gmail.com

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