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Not all people get to work the traditional 9 to 5 work schedule. Actually, over 22 million people in the U.S. work rotating, evening and on-call shifts. When you work non-traditional hours, you face a lot of challenges. It can be difficult to keep up with your friends and family. You might feel disconnected from those you really care about. You might have issues organizing your activities and your time. It might frustrate you that you can't plan around a typical day worker schedule.
But, on top of this, shift work can be hazardous too. Some people can develop shift work disorder.
Some reasons why shift work can be hazardous are:
• Working at night works against your body's natural clock.
• Being sleepy can interfere with decision making and lead to slower reactions.
• Individuals tend to misjudge their sleepiness, thinking they're alert and can make decent decisions, when their judgement is actually impaired.
• Lack of sleep from shift work could lead to certain conditions like shift work disorder. Doctors are often scheduled shift work. Below are some shift scheduling strategies to help you create a schedule that's fair to your doctors and will allow them to balance out their work/home life and get the well-deserved sleep they require.
Shift Scheduling Strategies to Help with Shift Work Disorder
1. Allow Employees to Show their Future Availability
When doctors make their future availability known, you can choose the ideal doctor for each shift based on their competence, skills and whether the shift is overtime or regular time. This ensures you have the proper staff at the right time at the right cost.
2. Find the Ideal Physician Scheduling Solution
Only the best automated emergency medicine scheduling software provides you with a clean look at every schedule period. You can see from one day to a whole month or more, including:
• Overstaffing
• Understaffing
• Open shifts
• Staff availability
This can help you not just save time, but it will also help you decrease labor costs by creating greater doctor satisfaction and reducing overtiming.
3. Empower Doctors to Swap Shifts
Unexpected shift changes are a part of every shift scheduling process. Physicians will have emergencies, will have to attend their kids school programs or will become sick. When you have a system in place that will automatically allow doctors to swap shifts when needed and for you to keep track of requests, it will make things simpler for both you and your doctors. This can especially be the case for emergency room scheduling where the patient volume can shift quickly and dramatically.
Having shift scheduling strategies in place is important for a productive running facility. Physician scheduling software can help streamline the process too, and help with shift work disorder.
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