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In any field of medicine, in many cases patients are only as happy as their physicians are. How can physician happiness be ensured? One of the easiest ways is to ensure that their schedules meet their needs. However, while a physician’s schedule plays a big part in his or her happiness, creating a schedule that meets specific needs isn’t always easy – especially when it concerns emergency medicine scheduling.
If you are the scheduling manager of an emergency room, you know how challenging it can be to create an ER physician schedule that ensures all areas are properly covered while meeting the specific needs of each physician. Emergency rooms are busy places that are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Keeping this ever important part of a hospital properly staffed is crucial; however, it can easily become a challenge for a scheduling manager.
Over-scheduling physicians, understaffing the department, and issues with requests off and sick days are all matters that make the job of an emergency medicine scheduling manager a difficult one. And, when emergency room physicians are not happy with their schedules, it can impact treatment of the patients.
So, how then, can a scheduling manager create a schedule that physicians will be happy with, that will ensure the emergency room is fully staffed and that will ensure patient care and satisfaction is met? Here are some tips that can help.
Things to Consider for a Physician Schedule
When creating a schedule for your emergency room physicians, there are several things that should be considered.
1) Fairness. Fairness of course is front and center when creating an ER physician schedule. You need to ensure that you are evenly distributing the workload among the available physicians. Scheduling one physician to work X amount of shifts more than another physician for no particular reason will quickly lead to frustration and exhaustion.
2) Requests. As a ER scheduling administrator, you need to take into account scheduling requests. Vacations, continuing education time off, and weekends are need to factor into the schedule.
3) Flexibility. Perhaps nowhere in medicine is the need for flexibility more apparent than in the ER department.
Make Use of Physician Scheduling Software
An excellent way to attend to the three aforementioned factors while meeting the needs of your physicians and patients is with the use of physician scheduling software.
With this specialized software, you can easily see what shifts need to be scheduled, what doctor is working at what time, see requests and shift changes – and more. When ER scheduling software is web-based, it allows its users to access the schedule from mobile devices to review their schedules, swap shifts, and make changes if needed.
Thanks to physician scheduling software, your job as a scheduling manager will be simplified, your physicians will experience improved satisfaction, and patient care will be improved. This type of software is definitely worth using when staffing emergency room physicians.
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