Emergency medicine scheduling is a complex and strategic process. The emergency department and healthcare, in general, is a fast-paced environment that requires highly skilled doctors, nurses and other healthcare staff.
Creating an efficient employee schedule is not only necessary, but it also ensures you have all the right resources in place at the right time. Not to mention, it impacts productivity, labor costs and legal compliance.
As a schedule manager, you are often having to deal with loads of: - Schedules
- Timetables
- Employee requests
- Availability calendars
These require manually managing them which for some schedulers, can take up your entire day, even a week to develop, edit and publish employee schedules.
Also, you're dealing with numerous schedule-related problems that require the attention of you, other managers and employees. When you have an organized shift scheduling system in place, it resolves many complicated situations and keeps your organization moving. Here are some best practices in emergency medicine scheduling.
Create an Easily Accessible Schedule
Once you create the schedule, ensure it’s easily accessible to all employees. When not in a visible place, it’s easy for employees to forget to view the schedule. If you're handing out hard copies of the schedule, it’s too easy for employees to misplace or lose them. Your doctors may show up late for work, or worse, not at all, if their schedule isn't easily accessible.
A great way to make your schedule easily accessible is to add it online so staff can access it from any computer or mobile phone. Today, it’s almost essential to have emergency medicine schedules available online and through mobile access.
Add Some Predictability to Employee Schedules
Your doctors and nurses will appreciate a little predictability in the schedule. They have a life outside of work and when there's no predictability in the schedule, it makes it difficult for employees to plan their life events — like a child's baseball game, for example.
Be Flexible
You should balance out your schedule appropriately to incoming patient volume. Balance out the schedule by offering different shift options such as:
Split-shifts
Part-time shifts
Extended shifts
An organized schedule is a productive and efficient schedule. Consider using physician scheduling software to make the schedule creation easier. Having to create the schedule manually takes time and effort. Automated scheduling software is a more efficient way to develop a schedule that's organized, balanced and easily accessible for all staff members. It saves time for you and improves employee productivity.
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