Recently, while waiting for an overly late doctor at a multiservice medical clinic in one of the major Metro Manila malls, I gawked at this oddly worded notice in the hallway:
For a more pleasurable experience, please ensure you are registered with the nurse station prior to doctors consultation.
I know that for most people needing medical attention, having to consult a doctor to find out what’s ailing them is never a pleasurable experience. In fact, it’s much more often an uncomfortable or excruciating one, which can become even more agonizing when the doctor is late by over an hour for the appointment. I therefore couldn’t fathom how a medical clinic that boasts of so many topnotch doctors and health care staff could ever think or assume that to see a doctor is a pleasurable experience to begin with, and that registering beforehand with the nurses’ station can make the medical consultation experience even more pleasurable.
So I asked myself: How come that the medical clinic had posted such an outrageously insensitive and insensible statement to waiting patients? I’ve always thought that medical doctors and other health-care professionals are among the most educated and English-proficient people in this planet, so they must be at the very least above-average communicators. Why then can’t that upscale medical clinic come up with a semantically, logically, and grammatically correct statement for that very basic message?
Let me say this straight: that notice seriously and embarrassingly fails to communicate. I am therefore inviting Forum members and guests—whether medical practitioners or not—to rephrase that notice so it would no longer be an affront to the sensibility of waiting patients. Please also tell us precisely what’s wrong with the English of that notice.
Aside from posting the best five versions of the notice here in the Forum, I intend to send them to the medical clinic concerned. Who knows, that medical clinic’s management might just use one of the versions to replace the current notice and perhaps offer its contributor free medical consultation in return.
P.S. If you find other medical-care signboards of this kind, please don’t hesitate to post them in the Forum or e-mail them to me. You may offer improved versions, or we can ask other Forum members to suggest a better wording for them.
