Hospitals are being advised to avoid giving out wait times if there’s no guarantee they’ll be met as it only severs to ratchet up patients’ anger dials.

Israeli research involving more than 400 patients (median age 36) presenting to an ED, found that patients were calmer when they were advised of wait times, but their patience started to turn to anger as the deadline approached.

Over four weeks, the researchers randomly selected patients to answer questions about the way the ED functioned, as well as the order in which patients were seen, to determine whether they felt the procedures were fair. 

Their tendency to aggression was then ranked, based on how much they would like to do something, like bang on a desk, barge into a room or interrupt a staff member, the investigators reported in Plos One.