A quality improvement project was conducted with the objective of improving the wait time in a county health department (CHD) Adult Primary Care Unit (APCU). The evaluation plan included waiting room time as one key waiting time process measure. Waiting room time was defined as the time elapsed between requesting that the patient be seated in the waiting room and the time he or she was called to be placed in an exam room. Suppose that, initially, a targeted wait time goal of 25 minutes was set. After implementing an improvement frame-work and process, the quality improvement team collected data on a sample of 355 patients. In this sample, the mean wait time was 23.05 minutes, with a standard deviation of 16.83 minutes. (Data extracted from M. Michael, S. D. Schaffer, P. L. Egan, B. B. Little, and P. S. Pritchard, “ Improving Wait Times and Patient Satisfaction in Primary Care,” Journal for Healthcare Quality, 2013, 35(2), pp. 50–60.)

a. If you test the null hypothesis at the 0.01 level of significance, is there evidence that the population mean wait time is less than 25 minutes?

b. Interpret the meaning of the p- value in this problem.