I guess I am confused about why everything is attributed to the personality characteristics of doctors. Most of your complaints are actually about the desk staff. And if you had acted on the impulse to become aggressive to hasten your appointment, thats who would've caught it. But unless you think the desk staff are perfect vessels through which the toxic personality of the physicians flow to intentionally annoying practices, it isn't really adequate to explain anything.

Both your example of retail and kitchen are team based work environments with way higher flexibility. One major difference between a doctor and either of those is that the main reason you go to the doctor is that you expect to have the undivided continuous attention of a specific and irreplaceable individual.

When you make a reservation at a restaurant, its for seats or tables. It is not for the personal attention of one of the cooks. You do not expect to show up at 6pm and within 10 minutes a specific cook walks in, serves you dinner and eats it with you. You expect to have a place to sit. Eating is after you wait. Sometimes it can be a while. Have you never said or thought "where the fuck is the food? We ordered ages ago!" Maybe if they served beer in the waiting room it would be more pleasent. I bet in France you can get that.

The doctor cannot really get other people to help them as you suggest like in retail. If your partner had been called on time, but instead of her usual doctor, the appointment was conducted by the dermatologist from the next office down the hall who was having a slow day, or the secretary, that wouldnt be acceptable. Its a situation where lots of things need to get done, they can be unpredictable, and delegation is only possible to a certain extent.

In my experience, doctors with bad attitudes can be more punctual. They are not interested in what you have to say, keep everything short, do not ask open ended questions, do not dig below the surface, and do the minimum effort. They are focused on seeing the most amount of people in the shortest amount of time to increase their income. Sometimes these people do not put any effort into organizing things because their patients time is irrelevant to them. For example I heard of a doctor who would book every patient for either 9am or 1pm then see them in the order they arrive. So if you got there at 903 and you were the last person for the morning, you'd be waiting til maybe 1230. That is taking the piss.

But in a normal situation, things can be more or less under the control of a specific doctor. It depends on the context. Some doctors are basically employees who's input is more influential than the secretary's, but no formal power. Of course there's macro economic stuff, capitalism etc. And lots in between.

Regardless where you are, I can pretty much guarantee the experience you had was economically incentivised if not enforced. Aspects of the doctors personality or attitude can make it a bit better or worse in unpredictable ways, but it is not just them sitting in a room doing nothing for 5 or 15 minutes to just sort of stir up a sense of desperation in your heart. They could probably do better but maybe not too much better.

But if the doctor would stop in the waiting room to tell you they are running late, and probably the next person who is also waiting for them, then people would try to talk to them out there. Can you imagine the chaos, nothing would ever get done. Or have the secretary announce it to everyone? Would you want to be listening to shouts of all the various doctors whereabouts constantly?

To what end? You are going to wait or you are not. If after x minutes you realize you have to leave now, to go to a conflicting obligation, then you tell them, appologize and you leave. Yelling won't help. And do you want your doctor to be stopping every 5 minutes to give an ETA on the rest of the visit? That isn't compatible with the kind of mental/physical work required to do the other stuff. Someone with ADHD should be able to appreciate how cognitively intrusive that would be. For anyone.

I'm sure lots of people have thought about what an average appointment length is. Thats like going to a store, finding something out of stock, and complaining that nobody ever considered anticipating customer demand levels before ordering. And then asking when it will be available, not getting a firm answer. And getting mad about that too. Thinking how stupid is it that nobody ever considered a system to track goods?

a visit with the subject "unexplained weightloss" Could be very short or very long. Like maybe a year ago a medication was added/stopped/changed and she forgot that weight change could be a side effect. Problem solved in 1 minute. Doctor now losing money for the next 29 minutes. Or it could require a lot of questions, exams, trying to find historical information, etc, well over 30mins. And if its really as urgent as you think, maybe they want to do some tests today so you have to go to the lab, which isn't run by arrogant doctors but somehow manages to have long wait times any way. And it is the whole day taken now. Ive had doctor appointment in the afternoon that snowballed and I didn't get home til middle of the night. More than once.

Anyway I have my own ideas of how to go about making things nicer, but they are irrelevant until my election campaign for peoples minister of doctors. In the interim, continue to plan for the world you wake up in, knowing its well known flaws. Long waits at doctors being one of them. Whatever self control is available should be used to avoid abusing other working class people even in emotionally tense moments. You almost certainly shouldn't abuse the doctor either although there's a few of them out there I'd let it pass. But if you did manage to save it for one of those doctors, if they had the personality you assume everything would just be heard as complaints about the secretary who would then be put in economic jepordy. Secretaries can be very annoying, I was recently frustrated beyond myself by someone who seemed to be making an obstacle of themselves for the fun of it, but I wouldn't expect anybody to reassure me that it was the right thing to be anything other than 100% courteous, because it was not. The real issues are structural, organizational and she had no influence on them. She just had to be the face of it and it is her "job" to adsorb unpleasantnesses from people affected. Secretary attitude merely a manifestation. A different person might have made it smoother but would have no impact on any of the material problems.