Intensive care faces some challenging obstacles, and the future of the intensive care unit (IC) will be built around these challenges and will have to make some changes basically due to the decline of expert intensive or critical care providers and an aging population. Demand for intensive care facilities within hospitals will rise with the millions of aging baby boomers growing. Thirty years from now, the ICU's in hospitals will need to work differently to manage the stable influx of patients who are critically ill.
The ICU is a part of the hospital where specially trained staff care for seriously ill patients. This specially trained staff includes:
- Doctors
- Nurses
- Pharmacists
- Clinical nurses
- Physical therapists
- Respiratory therapists
- Nurse practitioners
- Dietitians
- Chaplains
- Social workers
- Physician assistants
ICUs provide help to patients who have the most life-threatening and severe injuries and illnesses and who require close and constant support and invasive monitoring from medication and specialist equipment to ensure regular bodily functions.
Some patients, depending on their specific condition and unique situation, require special equipment in their rooms. They're connected to devices and machines that monitor their blood pressure, heart and respiratory rate. Some patients use breathing machines (ventilators) to help them breathe when they're not able to breathe by themselves.
Common conditions doctors treat inside an ICU include:
- Multiple organ failure - Trauma
-Sepsis
Critical care or intensive care is relentlessly hard work and is emotionally and physically exhausting. The challenge is avoiding doctor and nurse burnout to help with the retention rate. Burnout is typically the result of unorganized critical care physician scheduling.
One study showed Interns made significantly more medical errors when working frequent 24 hour or more shifts than those who work shorter shifts. By reducing how many hours healthcare professionals work each week and eliminating long work shifts, it can decrease the number of medical errors that occur in the ICU.
Staffing shortages is another problem in ICUs. And, when the ICUs are short on qualified and experienced staff, the patients suffer. The solution to these emergency medicine scheduling conflicts and challenges is in the use of technology that's readily available already to hospitals.
Being an ICU administrator in charge of the scheduling process, you understand the difficulty in coming up with a schedule that accommodates everyone. Creating a workable schedule can take hours. The answer is scheduling software.
Benefits of Intensive Care Scheduling Software
With shift scheduling software, you can:
Save Time
Easily accommodate a rotating shift schedule or compressed workweek. Schedule doctor rotations automatically and efficiently and easily cover any combination of nurse or doctor scheduling needs.
Improve Morale
Physicians can make their schedule change requests electronically. Intensive care scheduling software provides better types of communication with the message wall and SMS alerts. Reduce turnover rates while you're building the scheduling system around your doctors' and other ICU providers' shift preferences.
Improve Patient Care
Scheduling software makes it simpler to meet patient needs by scheduling qualified providers. Meet government and union regulations and quickly reach any staff member even if they're not scheduled to work.
As an ICU administrator, you have way more responsibilities than just scheduling ICU providers. You need to be organized in order to meet all your responsibilities. Emergency medicine scheduling software is the perfect tool with complete customization to meet your needs and focus on your patients.
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