Why are waiting room magazines typically out of date and old?

It is a mystery that has plagued patients in waiting rooms for years: why are the magazines in a doctor's office always out of date? Do the staff only put out old magazines, or do the newer ones disappear? 

Rest easy, because the first study to examine the phenomenon of magazines disappearing from waiting rooms has the answer.

Where do all the magazines go in waiting rooms? And which ones are disappearing? The new BMJ study investigates.

The study is part of the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal (BM), which traditionally publishes "quirky and fun" pieces of research that are nevertheless authentic peer-reviewed studies.

After fielding many complaints from his patients regarding the lack of up-to-date magazines in the waiting room of a medical office in Auckland, New Zealand, the researchers decided to investigate what they refer to the question of this article.

The researchers placed a total of 87 magazines into three mixed piles in the waiting room of this office. 

These included "non-gossipy magazines" - such as Time Magazine, The Economist and National Geographic - as well as "gossipy magazines" - defined as having more than five photos of celebrities on the front cover.

The researchers note that of the 82 magazines that had a date on the front cover, 47 were less than 2 months old and the rest were 3-12 months old. They marked each magazine with a unique number on the back and monitored the magazines - referred to as the "study participants" - twice each week.

'Gossipy' magazines more likely to disappear

Their quest was to determine whether new or old magazines disappeared first, to measure the rate of loss and the loss of gossipy versus non-gossipy magazines, the researchers say.

The study lasted for 31 days, and by the end, 47% of the magazines (41 of the 87) had disappeared at a rate of 1.32 magazines each day.

Results showed that current magazines were more likely to go missing than older ones - at a rate of 59%, compared with 27% - and gossipy magazines were more than 14 times more likely to disappear than non-gossipy ones.

In detail, of the 19 non-gossipy magazines - including Time and The Economist - none had disappeared by the end of the study, whereas of the 27 gossipy magazines, only one remained. Interestingly, the researchers also observed that the magazines that disappeared were much cheaper than those that were left.

Magazines disappear, at significant cost

The research team notes that the practice has a younger population; 39% of patients are under the age of 24, and 13% are over 65 years of age. However, the socioeconomic status of the patients is evenly spread. During the study, around 3,000 patients in total used the waiting area.

After calculating losing 41 magazines each month at an average cost of £3.20 ($5.00) per magazine over 8,000 practices in the Unite Kingdom, the researchers found that this would equate to £12.6 million ($19.8 million) disappearing from general practices.

As such, they recommend using old copies of The Economist and Time Magazine to save costs, and they suggest further research could include identifying "who or what is responsible for the removal of magazines."

In keeping with the "quirky" nature of the BMJ's Christmas issue, the researchers add:


"We discovered that the waiting room has its own hashtag on Twitter #waitingroom, with 140 character stories and pictures of adventures (or non-adventures) in all types of waiting rooms. We feel the existence of this hashtag bodes well for the future of waiting room science and we believe that it will not be long before students are tweeting excitedly about their latest courses #waitingroomscience."

Despite the fun nature of their research, the team does admit to some limitations. For one, it was conducted in a single clinic. Additionally, the small sample of "participants" (magazines), the unconventional definition of magazine type and the short study period are also potential limitations.

The researchers conclude that they "welcome a multinational collaboration to determine the generalizability of our results."

Before any readers raise concerns that money was wasted on such "quirky" research, however, it should be noted that the team did not receive any funding for their study.

References:

1. An exploration of the basis for patient complaints about the oldness of magazines in practice waiting rooms: cohort study, Bruce Arroll, et al., BMJ, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g7262, published online 11 December 2014.
2. The BMJ news release, accessed 12 December 2014.