A Black Barber and A NHS Doctor Walk Into A Bar
Who will see you first?
There is a specific kind of patience that Black people have developed. Not the passive, resigned kind. The active, knowing kind. The kind that lets you walk into a barbershop on a Saturday afternoon, clock that there are six people ahead of you, and still sit down because you already know the trim is going to be worth it.
There is this specific type of patience that you develop as a Black Man. The patience that is walking into a barber shop on a Saturday Afternoon and seeing six people ahead of you in the queue. You sit down because you know at the end of it the trim is going to be worth it.
Nobody tells you how long it’s going to take and by the time its almost your turn, the barber decides that he needs to pick up his daughter from after school club!
You wait the experience out because you’re not just getting a haircut you are getting seen!
I write this as I am sitting in the barbershop. I booked an appointment for 10:45 however it is now 12:12 and i’m still waiting! It got me thinking, this is very similar to how the NHS works…
The average experience for a patient is
You ring at 8am, The line drops.
You ring again. Engaged.
You try the online system. It tells you there are no appointments.
You call back at 8:04. You get through. You’re number eleven in the queue.
You wait. You explain your symptoms to a receptionist who isn’t a doctor.
You get a callback slot.
The doctor calls twenty minutes late because their clinic was running over, but they call. And in that ten-minute conversation, something shifts.
You’re not just getting a random conversation but something that has been causing you pain and discomfort is now finally being addressed.
The waiting, the frustration and the relief are all real feelings that you experience thru all of this. By the time you hang up, the 8am chaos and stress has already started to fade. Similar to by the time I leave the barbershop with a sharp lineup sharp, this two hour wait will be something of the past.
There’s a concept in behavioural economics called the peak-end rule the idea that we don’t judge an experience by its average, but by how it felt at its most intense moment and how it ended. The rest is largely noise.
A painful procedure followed by genuine warmth from a doctor is remembered more kindly than a painless one that ended with indifference. A long wait followed by a barber who actually listens to what you want who doesn’t just nod and do whatever is remembered as a good experience regardless of how long it took (This is how my new barber makes me feel).
The barbershop has always known this, even without the academic language. The craft at the end earns the patience at the beginning. The conversation during earns the loyalty that keeps you coming back.
The NHS knows it too, even if it has stopped acting like it does. When the relationship is right when the GP has seen you three times, knows your mum has hypertension, remembers you came in anxious last winter the system feels bearable. Not because the waiting times improved. Because the ending delivered.
What’s striking is that both institutions are built on a kind of unconditional loyalty that most businesses would kill for. People don’t just tolerate the inconvenience — they defend it. That’s my barber! That’s my GP/Hospital. The possessive is doing a lot of work in both sentences.
And both are under the same pressure right now. The barbershop faces the rise of mobile apps, walk-in chains, and the kind of frictionless convenience that younger generations are being trained to expect. The NHS faces the same, private GP apps that will see you in forty-five minutes, direct-to-consumer health brands promising care that fits around your life, not the other way around.
Some things aren’t broken. They’re just heavy.
The barbershop isn’t inefficient. It’s running a model of care that happens to also cut hair. The waiting is part of it the room fills up, people talk, the barber moves through each person with unhurried attention, and you watch enough of it to know that when it’s your turn, you’ll get the same.
The NHS, at its best, is the same kind of institution. Built not on convenience but on covenant. You show up and It will show up. Eventually.
The wahala is real. But so is what’s waiting on the other side of it.
That’s the business of care in full effect…