Betwixt and between: ritual and the management of an ultrasound waiting list.

Hospital waiting lists are a feature of publicly funded health services that results when demand appears to exceed supply. While much has been written about hospital waiting lists, little is known about the dynamics of diagnostic waiting lists, or more generally why hospital waiting lists behave in perverse and often counter-intuitive ways. This paper attempts to address this gap by applying a recent development in critical systems thinking called boundary critique to understand how a particular ultrasound waiting list was managed. A new waiting list metaphor based on waiting lists as ritual forms is proposed.