Digital signage for clinics and waiting rooms.

Where the screen goes

A practice has one room where a screen does most of its work: the waiting room. People sit there with little to do but look up, and they see whatever is on the wall more than once — so the screen goes where the chairs face, not where the staff stand.

On the wall the chairs face. If the room is L-shaped or split by a pillar, two smaller screens running the same playlist serve it better than one large screen half the room cannot see.

By the entrance or the desk. A second screen, in portrait, where people come in carries what they need first: how to check in, where to wait, which corridor leads where. It is read standing, so it holds less.

Not in the treatment rooms. There the patient is talking to the clinician, and a screen only competes.

The same holds for a GP surgery, a dental practice, a physiotherapy clinic or a vet. In a medical centre or a small hospital, give every waiting area its own screen, named in the dashboard after its room. A pharmacy is the exception: people stand in a queue at the counter, so the screen works more like a shop's — short messages, the opening hours, which pharmacy is on duty tonight.

How big, how high, and how loud

Measure from the back row of chairs, not from the door. Across a waiting room three to four metres deep, the hardware guide puts the screen at 43" to 55"; a larger waiting area or a hospital corridor wants the next size up.

A waiting room is read sitting down, so hang the screen lower than you would above a shop counter: high enough to clear the heads of people standing at the desk, low enough that nobody in a chair has to tip their head back for the length of a wait.

Landscape suits the main wall, where Zones can set the welcome, the clock and the weather side by side. Portrait suits the entrance. The orientation is a setting on each screen in the dashboard; decide it on the day you mount the screen, because the bracket and the cable length follow from it.

Then turn the sound off. Reception calls names, the phone rings, and some people in the room feel unwell. Choose video that works in silence — a slow nature film, a campaign clip with its words on screen — and turn the TV's volume down.

What goes on it

A waiting-room playlist should be short and calm. People see it several times during one wait, so nothing in it needs to shout.

1. The welcome, holding the screen longest: the practice's name, the opening hours, how to check in and the guest Wi-Fi. With Zones, the time and the weather stay beside it the whole time.
2. One campaign at a time — this season's vaccination poster as a PDF, or a design the practice made in Canva.
3. A QR code that opens your booking page, so the next check-up can be booked from the chair.
4. Something calm — Daily Wisdom set to Health & wellness and Life, or a nature video from YouTube.

Over all of it, the Ticker carries whatever reception needs to say today: a delay, a doctor who is off, a change to this week's hours. It is not a slot in the playlist: you pick the screens it runs over in its own settings, and it stays until someone takes it down.

A QR code for a Google review belongs by the exit rather than in front of the chairs: ask the people who have been seen, not the ones still waiting.

Writing for people who are waiting

People in a waiting room are often anxious, sometimes in pain, and not always reading in their first language. Write for them.

• Plain words, large type. “Please tell reception you have arrived” works for everyone. Keep the medical terms for the consultation.
• Nothing frightening. A poster that works in a corridor can be too much on a large screen facing a room with children in it. Look at every slide from the chairs before it goes up.
• Two languages when your patients need them. If many of your patients read another language more easily, write the welcome in both.
• Nothing about a patient, ever. No names, no appointment times, no “next patient”. The screen is for what everyone in the room may read.

The health information on the screen is the practice's own. SignageStack shows what you put on it and gives no medical advice, so check each slide as you would a printed leaflet before it goes up.

Keeping it right

A waiting-room screen still showing the winter flu clinic in spring tells patients that nobody looks at it. Give one person — usually the practice manager — the job of reading it from the chairs once a week, and give reception their own logins as Members, so the day's notices never wait for that person. A Member can change any content in the account; a Viewer can see everything and change nothing.

Set each screen's working hours to the practice's hours. Outside them the screen goes dark and comes back when the practice opens, on its own clock, even if the internet is down. One thing does reach a dark screen: an Emergency Alert, which covers the screens you chose within a second of being switched on. Write it on a calm day and leave it off.

Look at the screens list in the dashboard now and then: every player reports when it was last seen and what it is playing, so a screen that went dark shows up there before a patient mentions it.

Mistakes that are easy to avoid

• A delay still up at the end of the day. “Running 20 minutes late” at five o'clock tells the room something untrue. Whoever writes the line takes it down.
• The reception computer as the player. A TV plugged in as its second monitor is one misplaced window away from showing a patient record to the room. Use a small box behind the screen instead.
• Too much at once. Four panels of small text make a noticeboard again. In a small room, three zones are plenty.
• A screen that does not come back after a power cut. Check for automatic power-on in the TV's settings before you buy, and prefer a box that starts as soon as it gets power.