| dc.description.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. | en_US |
