Types of Scheduling Activities in Hospitals

There are many different types of scheduling associated with hospitals, including operating room, outpatient, general staff and nursing, and emergency room.

Operating Room Scheduling

Scheduling of surgical procedures in the operating theatre. Typically, surgeons are assigned operative blocks (for example, every Thursday) and their offices schedule procedures within this block. These bookings are communicated to the hospital’s OR bookings department using the surgical booking form, and the hospital OR booking clerk pre-registers the patient into the hospital for the day of surgery and enters surgical details into the hospital’s OR system.

Outpatient Scheduling

Scheduling of patients for outpatient procedures such as ultrasounds, CT scans or MRIs. Outpatient scheduling may occur through different ways, including:

• Booking of procedures by physician’s office through e-referral or portals such as Ocean.
• Patient self booking-patient is given a requisition from a physician and calls the hospital booking department to schedule their appointment. The scheduling clerk preregisters them in the clinical software system for the appointment and provides any preparation instructions. The registration is completed upon the patient’s arrival to the department; the patient must bring a requisition with them.

General Staffing/Nursing Scheduling

Scheduling of staff required to effectively run general and clinical hospital departments typically involved the assignment of personnel in various departments and time slots such as shifts. Scheduling is influenced by a variety of factors, including the mix of skills required, collective agreement provisions, historical and anticipated patient levels, patient acuity, and time of day.

Emergency Department Scheduling

This is very similar to general staff scheduling but specific to the ED with the added scheduling of ER physicians.

In the next several sections, we will be focusing on the basics of general staff scheduling in hospitals. We will be focused on key terms, the impact of collective agreements in staffing, and the creation and alteration of master schedules.

Attributions

“Medical Office Specialist.Still001” by Wisconsin Technical Colleges on flickr; Creative Commons – Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.