Patient waiting is a common phenomenon in the doctor’s waiting room. One acceptable standard of practice states that waiting time for patients to be seen by the first provider in hospital outpatient and public health clinics should be less than 30 minutes. A study was conducted to assess patient waiting at a primary healthcare clinic. Data were collected on a sample of 860 patients. In this sample, the mean wait time was 24.05 minutes, with a standard deviation of 16.5 minutes.

Source: Data extracted from BA Ahmad, K. Khairatul, and A. Farnazza, “An assessment of patient waiting and consultation time in a primary healthcare clinic,” Malaysian Family Practice, 2017, 12(1), pp. 14–21.

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 30 minutes?

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