by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
© May 2025
When you are hard of hearing, a common problem you often experience when going to a doctor’s office or some other medical clinic is knowing when they are calling your name.
A few clinics give you a number and you can see it displayed on a monitor or other display device when your number is being called. Other places have a large monitor showing a queue of the patients waiting. Thus, you can see your name and where you are in the queue. When your name reaches the top of the queue, you know you are being called.
Both of these accommodations are good visual ways to know when they are ready for you. Unfortunately, many clinics don’t use visual methods. In such cases, many of us hard-of-hearing folk sit facing the door from which the “nurse” will be calling our names and hope we can hear or speechread our names when we are called.
However, one problem that can arise is when there are two doors, one at each end of the waiting room. You don’t know which door to sit near to try to hear when your name is called. (I usually ask the receptionist if she can tell me from which door I’ll be called, then I sit close to that door, but this is not always foolproof, and trying to hear your name being called from the other end of the waiting room can be an exercise in futility.
Furthermore, in a busy clinic there may not be any empty chairs near or facing the door from which you’ll be called. Thus, you can neither hear or speechread when your name is being called.
However, the good news is that you can put the odds in your favor with a bit of creative thinking and pre-planning. For example, Mary Hair, who is hard of hearing like I am, came up with an ingenious solution.
What she did was to make up a special card on a brightly-colored piece of 8½” x 11” paper. On it she wrote:
“Patient is hard of hearing
I may not hear name called
Please bring this with you when you call my name
Mary Hair”
and finished it with a smiley face.
She hands this “card” to the receptionist at the front desk and asks them to pass it on to whomever will be calling her name and requests that they hold the card so it can be seen.
Does this strategy really work? Mary has been doing this for several years, and as she says, “Nine times out of ten they do bring the notice out, and I know it’s for me.”
I think this is a great strategy as it reduces your stress due to always having to be alert and straining to hear whether your name is being called or not. A quick glance at the person doing the name-calling is enough to see whether she has your “card”. Furthermore, this tip could be invaluable if you have a common name and thus there is a good chance that someone else with the same name is also in the waiting room.
I slightly modified Mary’s card. In addition to what she wrote, I added my picture and put my name underneath so the “nurse” can recognize me even if I somehow miss noticing I’m being called.
Here’s what my version of Mary’s card looks like.
Two important points:
1. Use a brightly-colored piece of paper so you can readily see the “card” when the person calls your name. (You’ll probably only see the back side of the card so choose a color you can see well.) Hopefully, no one else there is using the same strategy and has chosen the same-colored card as you have.
2. Remember to get your “card” back so you can use it the next time you are at a clinic.
Make up your own card and use it the next time you visit a medical clinic and see how well it works for you. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much doing this can reduce your stress level.
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