Patient Waiting Time-Not a Gaussian Distribution

A Gaussian distribution does not represent all data. For instance, the average waiting time for patients in a physician's waiting room is 21 minutes in the U.S. But as we all may know, this varies dramatically. This is illustrated by some people waiting five minutes, compared to other people who wait 30 minutes. There is an extreme minimum but rarely is there an extreme minimum (over 30 minutes). If we wanted to show a distribution for individual wait time, the best way to depict this would be by an Extreme Value Type I distribution. This accounts for the fact that many people do wait about 15 to 22 minutes plus or minus 2, but that many people also wait a shorter time than around the mean.