Question

What is the weekly workload for the surgeons? To find the time spent on each type of surgery use this formula. [Changeover time (number of procedures)] + [surgery time (number of procedures)]. You would do this for each type of surgery. This will be in minutes so you can covert the minutes to hours and compare to the hours assigned to surgery. Safety capacity is set at 10%. This is the amount of time left to cover emergency situations. Is this adequate? Should it be lowered or raised? Why? Do you have any ideas about how the doctors could add more surgery time but still see the patients that are needing to be seen in the office? If the surgeons could do back- to- back same procedures this would eliminate some set up time and make more time available for additional patients? Is this feasible at all? Why or why not? Should they hire another surgeon or not? Should they hire some other kinds of staff? If so, what staff positions might they add?

Answer 1

The weekly workload for surgeons can be managed by calculating the time spent on each surgery and adjusting the safety capacity accordingly. Back-to-back surgeries may increase efficiency but must be balanced with concerns of fatigue. Hiring additional surgeons or support staff like physician assistants could alleviate excessive workloads.

Step-by-step explanation:

To assess the weekly workload for surgeons, one would calculate the total time spent on surgeries by adding the changeover time and surgery time for each type of surgery. After computing the total minutes, convert it into hours to compare with the hours allotted for surgery. Given that a safety capacity of 10% is set to cover emergency situations, the adequacy of this percentage depends on past experiences of the surgeons and the frequency of emergencies encountered. If the safety capacity is frequently exceeded, it may be advisable to increase it to ensure that there is enough buffer time. Conversely, if seldom needed, it might be reasonable to reduce it slightly.

One way surgeons could add more surgery time is by scheduling back-to-back procedures of the same type, thus reducing the setup time associated with changeovers. This can be feasible if the type of surgeries allows for it and if there is enough volume of the same surgery to fill a schedule. However, this must be balanced with the potential for fatigue and the drop in performance that could result from a lack of variety in tasks.

In concerns to staffing, hiring another surgeon might be necessary if the current surgical workload exceeds the capacity of the existing staff, leading to long waiting times and overworked surgeons. Alternately, hiring additional support staff or specialized healthcare professionals like physician assistants, or nurse practitioners, might be more cost-effective and could assist in non-surgical tasks, thus freeing up more time for the surgeons to operate.