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Lifetimes of the clinical consultation: the current situation of healthcare consultations.

It’s Monday morning, a busy day in the GP surgery. Eighteen patients to be seen, each allocated a 10-minute slot. For a few, this will be all they need. For many, 10 minutes will never do justice to the complexity of their stories and lives. The hospital outpatient setting is not dissimilar, where, once again, discrete, time-limited appointments are allocated to each patient regardless of their background or the reason they are being seen.

This familiar standardisation of time in health care resonates with a work by Paul Spooner that was once encased behind perspex outside the Science Museum’s old medicine galleries in London. The waist-height automaton is based on an 18th-century construct of time, which is conceived as linear and predictable. It visually summarises the health-screening programmes of the late 20th century, as three plates offer three glimpses into three consultation scenes. Inch-high doctors and nurses spend a moment with a patient, before the plate rotates and brings them the next. Nurses pirouette around on the bottom layer, lifting up newborns; a bald doctor occupies the middle disc, making notes on the progress of four growing children; and on the top layer a matronly figure examines four pregnant women on trolleys.

The patients turn with the discs, coming to a halt when they reach the stationary healthcare professionals who go through the motions of giving their precisely timed appointments, making the appropriate checks, and caring for a population through the phases of human life. Every interaction is measured and runs in cycles; time slots dominate the entire machine, and frame every interaction in this representation of modern-day health care. It is a beautiful model in its simplicity of conception and execution, and it represents an elegant model of health care, with every event predictable, and every process precise, carried …