What's Playing in Your Waiting Room? Patient and Provider Stress and the Impact of Waiting Room Media

Abstract

Patients enter the healthcare space shouldering a lot of personal stress. Concurrently, health care providers and staff are managing their own personalstressors as well as workplace stressors. As stress can negatively affect the patient-provider experience and cognitive function of both individuals, it is imperative to try to uplift the health care environment for all. Part of the healthcare environmental psychology strategy to reduce stress often includes televisions in waiting rooms, cafeterias, and elsewhere, with the intent to distract the viewer and make waiting easier. Although well-intentioned, many select programming which can induce stress (eg, news). In contrast, as positive media can induce desirable changes in mood, it is possible to use it to decrease stress and uplift viewers, including staff. Positive media includes both nature media, which can relax and calm viewers and kindness media, which uplifts viewers, induces calm, and promotes interpersonal connection and generosity. Careful consideration of waiting room media can affect the patient-provider experience.

Keywords: burnout; cognitive function; compassion; emotion contagion; health care environment; kindness; media psychology; stress.

Figure 1.

Both patients and providers come to the health care setting with their own personal stressors, including finances, health, discrimination, among many others. In the health care setting, additional stressors are potentially imposed, as shown. One of those is how media and other environmental factors will affect them, often subconsciously. The providers will be burdened by a heavy workload in a time-constrained encounter. They will undoubtedly feel the pressure to stay on time and manage their workloads as well as be affected by interactions with staff and other patients. Finally, they likely have had some media exposure during the day, even briefly.

Figure 2.

The patient and provider enter the encounter, each being differentially affected by their own stressors. The weight of those stressors will influence how well they can listen and communicate with one another. Listening is a key aspect for the patient demonstrating that the provider cares about them, creating trust and greater patient engagement. In addition, the emotional state of each is affecting the other. A more negative mood of one party will affect the other and likely create a vicious cycle. Conversely, a more positive mood can positively affect the quality of that interaction.

Figure 3.

A still image example of kindness media from a Filipino photographer. The reader might reflect on how they feel after seeing the image, which can provide personal insight into how kindness media can affect viewers. Photo by Brian Enriquez, with permission.

Figure 4.

A still image example of kindness media from a photographer from Turkey. The reader might reflect on how they feel after seeing the image, which can provide personal insight into how kindness media can affect viewers. Photo by Leyla Emektar, with permission.