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The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) is the body that governs accreditation of most U.S. graduate medical training programs. This includes residencies, fellowships, internships, and more. Their rules are law and violating their rules, even unintentionally, can cause big problems.
What’s the Big Deal about Resident Hours?
ACGME understands that residency is an invaluable period of learning and adjustment as individuals make the transition from student to professional. It’s not all about competency, but learning how to meet an increasing number of demands while making the challenging decisions medical professionals are called upon to make on a daily basis.
The organization wants to provide residents with the best possible foundation for doing this while providing them with every opportunity to be successful in their residencies and beyond. This is why they’ve established such rigorous requirements for the scheduling process which includes a strict limit of 80 duty hours per week when averaged over a four-week period of time.
Residents have many demands on their time including clinical and academic commitments. Finding balance for these hours and still managing to meet the accreditation requirements of the ACGME can be a challenge in the best of times.
Oversight and tracking of duty hours is a large responsibility for program directors in charge of medical residents. That’s why it’s so important to take extra precautions in your shift scheduling efforts for residents.
Help is in the Tools
Resident scheduling software helps you manage residents’ schedules in order to ensure they comply with ACGME requirements. There are other benefits for using software to help with emergency medicine scheduling, resident shift managing, and more. These benefits include:
- Reduces scheduling errors.
- Eliminates uncovered shifts.
- Improves compliance with “duty hour” rules.
- Allows residents the convenience of online schedule viewing.
- Easy to implement.
- Crunches numbers automatically.
- Allows much easier rearrangements of schedules when necessary.
- Vacation and time off requests are easy to incorporate.
Depending on the size and scope of your residency program, manually recording and planning resident hours is an unnecessarily cumbersome responsibility. Scheduling software is a small investment that provides an outstanding return in the number of “man hours” invested in the scheduling process alone.
Long-term savings of shift scheduling software really add up for the average medical facility, where expenses are considerable concerns. Keep that in mind as you explore your options as well as the advantages of knowing the hours of all employees well in advance and avoiding potentially problematic over-booking of residents.
It’s true that very few programs can accommodate all scheduling requests every time. However, using sophisticated scheduling software goes a long way towards ensuring that as many requests as are humanly possible to meet will be met.
Don’t continue beating your head against the proverbial wall when it comes to scheduling medical residents. Invest in top quality software that takes all the heavy lifting out of the process so you can focus on more important things, like educating them instead.
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