Sometimes when you’re on hour 12 of your shift working 6-7 shifts/week, after having dealt with 20 similar patients that day, you need a coffee before being able to properly evaluate the next potentially lethal leg infection.

I’d be willing to bet the actual interaction with the doctor is a short part of the 2 hours that you’re there. And I think this is where a lot of the scheduling frustration comes in.

For the US: Sometimes the physician doesn’t actually control scheduling, it is done by whoever owns/runs the clinic. Also, there arent scheduled gaps because lots of things need to happen when a patient shows up. So while the physician finishes up with the last patient and is doing their documentation, an MA or RN will start intake on the next patient taking them to their room, getting vitals, etc. Then the physician sees them. So even 20 min appointments are generally longer because someone might arrive on time at 1pm, then by the time they’re checked in, in a room, done with vitals, it might already be 1:10. So there are like natural gaps that occur in the schedule. But I agree that the lack of transparency in the process really makes it difficult to stay on schedule. Ideally there’d be 1:1 appointment: documentation time for each patient, however payment structures are not designed for this. Instead they like to maximize the number of patients seen per day.

If you’re reporting your income on your taxes then your employer literally cannot be doing that. Sure it gets averaged over your pay period, but you should still be making at least minimum wage.

Also to clarify, the rationale for tip based workers having a lower default minimum wage is that if they do not come up to the regular minimum wage with their tips+salary, then employer has to make up the difference. But usually they end up making more than minimum wage with the tips.

But taxes, insurance, and maintenance costs do