How often are people late for appointments?

This is an interesting post in which a doctor is vexed by how often his patients are late and asking whether this is the norm.

The post does address this and found a study showing that 7.7% (one in thirteen) patients are late for doctor appointments.

However, it also pointed out that another study shows an average patient wait time of 38 minutes for the doctor. Gulp. Mea culpa maxima.

My own experience and perspective?

• We do encourage the first patient of every morning and afternoon to arrive 10-15 minutes early to make it easy to start out on time.  I do often run late because the first patient is late to arrive and I am then already starting off 15 minutes behind.
• I do spend a lot of time with  each  patient.  It's difficult to arrive at an accurate diagnosis without an extensive understanding of the development and nature of symptoms and a physical examination.  This takes time.  There's good medicine and fast medicine, but no good, fast medicine.
• I gotta admit that because of this I rarely ask patients to re-schedule if they happen to be running late!