Establishing an Appraisal Scoring System for Employees' Working Schedule Design: An Example of Emergency Physicians in a Medical Center

• Main Authors: Ting-Yao Wu, 吳亭瑤
• Other Authors: Yu-Cheng Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/4euj3d

碩士 === 嘉南藥理大學 === 醫務管理系 === 102 === Background: Taiwan's medical employment situation deteriorating leads to a serious loss of emergency medical manpower. Emergency violence, heavy workload, rest is not normal, working pressure, etc., are the main factors. Objectives: A computer-aided staff-scheduling system (CASSS) rapidly and effectively allocates the physicians needed in a hospital’s emergency department. It reduces transcription time and human data input errors. An efficacious indicator of whether the staffing result meets government regulations and fits the hospital’s policy is urgently required. Besides programming a CASSS, we develop an objective indicator for a physician staffing schedule of an emergency department as well as simulate the benefit comparing between prior and post CASSS. Methods: A set of criteria for assessing a reasonable hospital physicians’ staffing schedule was collected. An Excel VBA module was programmed and incorporated with a rating scale to judge monthly physicians’ staffing schedules in a hospital’s emergency department. A system dynamic simulation using Vensim software was used to compare the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of traditional hand-plus-human-brain and digital methods after considering various strategies, e.g., feasible scheduling periods (daily, weekly, fortnightly, and monthly), judgments by a human brain versus those by a computerized method with variables related to time, staff, and expenses required to create the feasible and acceptable schedules. Results: The developed staff scheduling module significantly saved time just 10 minutes to finish more than a hundred physicians’ staffing schedule workload and increased work satisfaction. The staffing results were forced to fit government regulations and hospital staffing policy. Conclusion: The Excel VBA staffing and assessing module simulated scenario was more efficient and effective than the traditional manual method. Additional studies are recommended to determine whether this module is also appropriate for staff scheduling in other departments in a hospital. With this computerized system compared to the traditional human brain method, more than NT$600,000 per month could be saved on the manpower cost after 100-week total simulating implementation in a hospital.