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The US Veterans Affairs system has waiting lists for medical care. Due to Congressional oversight the length of this waiting list was scrutinized. Adding capaci
by supertrope 3y ago
The US Veterans Affairs system has waiting lists for medical care. Due to Congressional oversight the length of this waiting list was scrutinized. Adding capacity through hiring more medical personnel takes more budget and time. Load shedding through not letting people get on the wait list is unacceptable. So the bureaucracy added an additional buffer. They added patients to a secret overflow wait list and moved them to the official wait list only when it was not too long. https://www.cnn.com/2014/04/23/health/veterans-dying-health-care-delays/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2014/04/23/health/veterans-dying-health-...
- klabb3 3y agoThat’s an innovative way of doing it! Another, much more prevalent way is: only open appointments for 1 week/month ahead, then reject new bookings when full. Tell your clients “just book fast at Monday X am” knowing full well it’s a damn lottery. Or even worse, don’t tell customers about the release time “to fight bots”. Then of course, blame bots for taking the appointments, and somehow fool people that bots are the reason for the size of the real queue. This has come up so many times I’ve lost count. Usually with governments or some service that a corporation provides reluctantly. It does one thing really well: obscure the true size of the queue. Just like in the article, that’s a feature.