Planning the activities of doctors in a teaching hospital

Abstract

Doctors in a teaching hospital perform a variety of teaching, research, seminar, and in-patient care activities in addition to managing outpatient volumes. In this paper, we study the weekly activities of a doctor in a large teaching hospital in southern India, where the doctor's daily work load has grown primarily due to large patient volumes (during the year 2010-11, the hospital handled a daily load of 5,000 outpatients, 2,000 inpatients, and 125 surgeries) and large student intake per year (about 2000 students in various health disciplines). Ineffective doctor activities plan often resulted in missed activities, long patient duration of stay (3 days between successive visits), long doctor hospital hours (more than 10 hours per day), and low patient satisfaction levels. We propose alternate plans for doctors’ activities without compromising their involvement in other activities and maintaining the same quality of patient service. The period of stay of the out-patients as well as doctors hospital hours are reduced substantially, mutually benefiting both the hospital and the patients.