Surviving the Angry Patient

Urgent care medicine balances clinical efficiency and patient satisfaction. Providers are expected to see 40-60 patients during a 12-hour shift, provide timely and appropriate medical care, document comprehensively, all while maintaining a patient satisfaction score of 70% or higher. Difficult patient encounters are inevitable in a specialty that thrives on patient satisfaction and throughput. Encountering a problematic patient can derail the rest of the day and demands empathy and patience. All of which makes it hard to meet metrics. This article examines how difficult patient encounters contribute to provider burnout, lowers patient satisfaction, and increases the risk of litigation. Additionally, identifying interventions and mitigation strategies that the urgent care team can influence to improve the encounter for the provider and patient alike. A structured literature review was conducted using peer-reviewed articles from PubMed and Google Scholar. Inclusion criteria were set to “urgent care”, “difficult patient”, “satisfaction score”, “angry patient”, “time management”, and “patient experience.” The article limitations applied were free full-text and published dates of the last five years. Long wait times can influence patient aggression, increasing the risk of litigation. Enhancing operational efficiency by decreasing wait times at all levels of care can lead to higher patient satisfaction. Enhancing personal connection to humanize the patient, rather than approaching each visit as a chief complaint. Prioritizing communication to include patient discharge and follow-up instructions can improve the patient-provider interaction. Mitigation methods enhance provider resilience, thereby reducing the impact of difficult patient encounters. There are very few publications and randomized trials involving the urgent care setting. Most involve the emergency room or specialty clinics. There is not enough time to discover why a patient is difficult, and there is no universal method to mitigate the effects of these encounters. Therefore, using a multi-factorial approach by applying multiple methods outlined in this article to each patient may improve the patient's and provider’s Urgent Care experience.