Worked scenario
Twenty-minute slots for a fifteen-minute doctor and a forty-minute patient
A clinic does not run late because doctors are slow. It runs late because the slot length was set to an average that describes almost no actual consultation.
3 min read
Most clinic books are built on a single slot length. It was chosen at setup, it has not been revisited, and it is treated as a property of the clinic rather than of the consultation.
Where the day goes wrong
A first consultation, a review and a procedure are not the same length, but they occupy identical slots. Two long ones early and the schedule never recovers, because there is no slack built in anywhere after nine o'clock.
The waiting room takes the strain, and the clinic's reputation is set by the wait rather than by the medicine.
The measurement nobody has
How long consultations actually take, by type and by doctor. It is recordable — the clinic already knows when a patient was called and when the next was — and almost nobody looks at it.
The distribution is usually wide enough that a single slot length cannot be defended once anyone sees it.
Walk-ins are a capacity decision
Clinics that serve walk-ins alongside appointments often treat them as interruptions. They are not; they are predictable volume. Reserving capacity for them makes the book honest, where absorbing them makes every appointment after eleven approximate.
What changes
- Slot length varying by consultation type rather than one figure for all
- Walk-in capacity reserved explicitly instead of absorbed by overrun
- Actual consultation duration recorded and compared with the booked length
- Waiting time visible as a number the clinic can manage
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