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When you help to manage schedules for medical staff in a hospital, you already know there are some unique needs when it comes to your hospitalists. These physicians are in the hospital full-time, providing around-the-clock care for your patients who are currently staying in the hospital. They provide a very important type of care for patients, but it is also essential to remember that their schedules are a bit different than rotating physicians and surgeons. This information provides you more insight into why you should use a hospitalist scheduling program for them.
Hospitalists Always Need to Be Available
The main reason why you need to use a scheduling program for your hospitalists is because they can tend to work longer hours than other medical staff in the hospital. They always need to be available, which not only means assigned shifts, but they frequently work past their assigned shifts if one of their patients is having a complication while in the hospital.
With emergency medicine scheduling software, you are able to ensure enough hospitalists are on-call, but it also lets you easily send alerts to hospitalists who are not on call if they need to come in since one of their patients is in need of care.
You Don’t Want the Hospitalist to Be Over-Worked
A common issue with hospitalists is related to how their schedules work. It is all too common that they end up being on-call during their expected time off, so that they work more than the intended amount of hours. Not only does this create issues with overtime, but they could become over-worked, fatigued, and burned out. It is important that you have a way to see exactly how their shift scheduling is working for them, whether with assigned shifts or being called in to the hospital. The scheduling program is an easy way to keep track.
Holiday Time Can Get Tricky
Since hospitalists don’t always work traditional rotation shifts, figuring out their proper holiday and vacation time can get a little tricky. Your hospitalists might not have traditional paid time off because they don’t have predictable schedule patterns. Instead, they will work one week on, then one week off in many cases.
With a physician scheduling program, you are able to look at the patterns of their work shifts and determine if they should get more vacation time, such as a hospitalist that did not get a full week off because they will be called in to tend to patients. This allows them to have proper time off when it is needed and simplifies the entire process. In addition, it helps with hospitalist burnout.
For these reasons and more, it behooves you to look into a hospitalist scheduling program for your dedicated in-patient physicians.
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