Mr Vincent Chua1, Dr Jasper Tong1,2
1Allied Health Office, KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Singapore, 2Group Allied Health, SingHealth, Singapore
Abstract:
Background:
Academic medical hospitals pursue multiple goals simultaneously: quality care to patients, operational excellence and sustainability, research, education, and staff wellness. Developing capability to monitor and manage staff workload is essential for optimizing patient care and staff wellness. Monitoring and managing nursing workload are well documented but limited literature is found for Allied Health Professionals (AHPs). The complication arises when accounting for indirect efforts in patient care. To further complicate the matter, AHPs are a diverse group with different roles. We present a cost-effective method to monitor and manage AHPs workload for informed decision making.
Methodology:
Direct effort is embedded in the charge codes of hospital billing system. As manual surveys and upgrading of the current Electronic Medical Records to track indirect efforts are costly, two tables: non-patient contact hours and other professional work tasks are developed. These are used to compute Patient Contact Hours per staff and expressed as a percentage of the theoretical maximum monthly clinical hours of a staff.
Results:
We found wide variation across all AHP specialties on reaching their theoretical maximum monthly clinical hours. Also, the non-patient contact hours could be as much as the direct effort for some AHPs. This capability provides a visual representation for Allied Health leaders to act towards optimizing staff to workload ratio.
Discussion:
This method assumes all AHPs are equally skilled and efficient, and all patients’ needs are equal, which is inaccurate. However, it is a cost-effective capability to monitor and manage staff to workload ratio.