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Waiting room


A waiting room is a building, or more commonly a part of a building or a room, where people sit or stand until the event or appointment which they are waiting for begins.

There are two types of waiting room. One is where individuals leave for appointments one at a time, or in small groups, for instance at a doctor's office, a hospital triage area or outside a school headmaster's office. The other is where people leave en masse such as those at railway stations, bus stations, and airports. These two examples also highlight the difference between waiting rooms where one is asked to wait (private waiting rooms) and waiting rooms one can enter at will (public waiting rooms).

People in private waiting rooms are queued up based on various methods in different types of waiting rooms. In hospital emergency room waiting areas, patients are triaged by a nurse, and they are seen by the doctor depending on the severity of their medical condition. In a doctor's or dentist's waiting room, patients are generally seen in the order in which their appointments are for, with the exception of emergency cases, which get seen immediately upon their arrival. In Canada, where there is publicly-provided health care, controversy has arisen when some important people or celebrities have jumped the line (which is supposed to be based on the appointment order or by severity of condition). In some government offices, such as motor vehicle registration offices or social assistance services, there is a "first-come, first-served" approach in which clients take a number when they arrive. The clients are then seen in the order of their number. In the 2010s, some government offices have a triage-based variant of the first-come, first-served approach, in which some clients are seen by the civil servants faster than others, depending on the nature of their service request and/or the availability of civil servants. This approach can lead to frustration for clients who are waiting, because one client who has been waiting for 30 minutes may see another client come in, take a number, and then be seen within five minutes.


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