How Our (Optional) Scheduling Works While You Are On Our Waitlist

Unfortunately, due to the high demand for our services, we are sometimes not able to fit in new clients right away.  We often need to put new clients on a waitlist before we are able to fit them into our regular weekly caseload.

We sincerely apologize for our inability to get you in immediately; we know that frankly, it sucks to have to go on a waitlist.  You are probably eager to get started on treatment as soon as possible and that waiting is not ideal. Since we understand the urgency of getting you in as quickly as we can, we try to take great pains to get people in to start with us as soon as we possibly can.

The best way we have found to do this is to allow clients on our waitlist to schedule appointments, but with some restrictions.

The upside to allowing this is that it allows clients to be able to start therapy right away even in spite of our waitlist.  The downside is that the restrictions can sometimes create some initial confusion if clients do not fully understand these restrictions.

However, we find that this confusion is avoided if clients read the full explanation of these rules below, and we believe that the upside of getting clients in faster outweighs the downside of any initial confusion. 

The system we use is actually quite simple, and the alternative to these rules would be that there is no way around waiting to get in with us.

 

So here is how it works:

• If you are on our waitlist, you are welcome to use our online scheduler to book any appointment available within the next 4 calendar days, but not further out than that.  For instance if today is March 15th, you could book any appointment for March 19th or earlier, but you cannot book appointments for March 20th or later.

  • We typically go into every week with all of our appointment slots filled by established clients. But each week, a few clients will cancel here and there, opening up some available times. These canceled appointment slots are what we make available to clients on our waitlist.  We have to have a waitlist because we do not want an established client to not be able to get an appointment in a given week because we gave too many appointment slots to new clients. But we allow waitlist clients to schedule once we hit 4 days out because at that point, established clients have had a chance to book and it is unlikely any of them will need the appointment slot. This way, even though we cannot yet guarantee a weekly appointment for you, we are able to get the ball rolling much sooner and have therapy start much earlier.  We have found that clients who are proactive about this and who have relatively flexible scheduling availability are generally able to get an appointment most weeks even when they are on the waitlist.

• If you are on our waitlist and you book an appointment more than four days in advance, we will have to cancel the appointment.

  • This is the scenario we really try to avoid by explaining these rules here in detail, as we know it is a frustrating experience for you if we have to cancel an appointment you booked.  We need to do this though because we really need to keep the appointments available for our established clients who are in the middle of therapy with us already.   Therefore, if you book an appointment more than 4 days in advance, we will have to cancel it in order to protect our availability for established clients.  Please know that once you are off the waitlist and are an established client on our regular caseload, your appointment slots will be protected by this policy.

• Sometimes, a therapist may have a waitlist only for late-day appointments (4pm start times and later), meaning they can get you onto their caseload immediately if you can regularly come in for 3pm start times and earlier.

  • This means that if you can do appointment start times 3pm or earlier, they can get you onto their caseload right away with no scheduling restrictions. But if you require 4pm appointments or later, you will need to go on the waitlist for those appointment times and can only book appointments 4pm or later within this 4-day window.  We sometimes need to do this because demand for after-school or after-work appointments is extremely high and there simply aren’t enough hours available to fit in everybody who wants those times.

• Getting in one time for an appointment scheduled this way while you are on the waitlist does NOT mean you can then freely schedule appointments for any date or time after that.

  • You will still be on the waitlist and must continue to schedule within this four-day window until we let you know that your therapist has a spot available on their regular active caseload for you.

• The need to have your appointments scheduled in this fashion is only temporary.

  • Once your turn comes up to get onto your therapist’s regular active caseload, you will be able to book as many appointments as you want as far out in advance as you want, guaranteeing you an appointment every week.  You can always feel free to contact us to check in on how much longer we expect the wait to be to get onto the active caseload.  It just depends on when current clients finish therapy, and we can give you a range of time we expect for how long this will take before it’s your turn.

Thanks for taking the time to read all this and for your understanding about these restrictions.  We know it can be frustrating to want to get help right away and to not be able to.  The intent of these policies is to get your therapy started as soon as possible while still not taking appointment slots from our already-established clients.  We hope this all makes sense, but if there is anything else we can do to make any of this clearer or more user-friendly, please contact our practice owner, Dr. Michael Stein, at drstein@anxietysolutionsofdenver.com, as we are very open to suggestions for anything we can improve here.

We look forward to getting started with you soon!

A few other helpful details to keep in mind:

• While you are on the waitlist and are scheduling in this way, we cannot guarantee that we will have an appointment available for you every week. It is possible that you may have an appointment one week but then have to wait a couple of weeks for another appointment that works for your schedule to become available. We know that this is not ideal, but clients tend to like having this option anyway because it is much better than not being able to get in at all while they are on the waitlist.
• Scheduling while you are on the waitlist is completely optional: if you feel that it does not work for you to have uncertainty about when you will be able to get in and how long it will be between appointments, then you do not need to schedule at all while you are on the waitlist.  You can simply wait for your turn to come up for a spot on our regular active caseload, and then you can schedule a recurring weekly appointment time.
• Scheduling appointments in this way does require you to be a bit proactive to make sure you get appointments. Appointment slots are updated immediately in the online scheduler as they are booked or canceled and are first come, first serve; so we recommend checking the online scheduler each day to see if any appointments have opened up that would work for you.
• On the online scheduler, you may see that the only available appointment type is “session for established client”. Once you have read these instructions, you may ignore that and book it anyway, as long as it is within the next 4 days.
• For your first session, you are welcome to book with any therapist of your choosing (though some therapists have age restrictions). After you have already met with a therapist, that is your therapist for all of your sessions going forward, so please only book with them for all future appointments.  If you would like to know what the wait times are for each therapist, please contact us and we would be happy to give you the expected wait time for each therapist so you can make an informed decision about who to book your first session with.
• There is no waitlist for initial free phone consultations, you may schedule those by contacting us at any time.
• Please make sure that we have you on the waitlist before using the online scheduler this way. To get on our waitlist, simply call us at 303-940-7740 or email at newclients@anxietysolutionsofdenver.com.

Here is the online scheduler you can use to book your appointments: