What We Are Doing for Sydney Adventist Hospital

Sydney Adventist Hospital (in Wahroonga) is a not-for-profit, acute-care private hospital licensed by the New South Wales Department of Health for 342 beds, making it the largest single campus private hospital in NSW. It was the first private hospital in NSW to be accredited by the Australian Council on Healthcare standards.

The Process in Focus

Rostering of On-Call Practitioners

Business Problem

Sydney Adventist Hospital is required to have specialists from all medical and surgical specialties on call at all times after hours and weekends to deal with patients being admitted through their busy Emergency Care department. A doctor from each specialty typically administers the roster on behalf of the other specialists. The Medical Administration department co-ordinates rosters for Sydney Adventist Hospital. This includes assisting each specialty to set up and, maintain rosters and to ensure all contact details are up to date. They also administer the roster for the Surgical Assistant roster, and assist with filling gaps in the Career Medical Officer Roster. Version control is a challenge where there are a lot of shift swaps. Departments and rostered doctors were not always keeping up to date with the correct roster.

The Solution

In November 2006, at the request of the Hospital’s anaesthetists, irwinSolutions deployed SmartAppointTM, its online scheduling solution to assist the Hospital’s anaesthetists to manage their emergency on-call roster. SmartAppointTM enables the practitioners to go online and schedule their roster themselves. The Medical Administration teamare given administrative privileges to maintain the online roster. All anaesthetists receive email confirmations of their rostered dates and SMS reminders of their rostered shifts the day before.

Key Benefits

- Self Allocation: Practitioners can pick and choose the days that suit them instead of forwarding their preferences a year in advance and leaving it to a colleague to co-ordinate and manage conflicts and allocate suitable days

- Real Time Access: Practitioners have anytime and anywhere access in setting up and viewing their own schedules; and

- Better Communication: Email confirmation and SMS reminders ensure that the latest rostering information is communicated and the risk of a rostered practitioner forgetting their on-call obligations is significantly reduced.

Going Forward:

Due to the successful deployment and use of this solution, Sydney Adventist Hospital will be rolling out SmartAppointTM to manage 20 other On Call rosters within the Hospital. This will include on-call rosters for departments such as Orthopaedics; Paediatrics; Neurosurgery; Respiratory Medicine and Hand Surgery. Additional features will be introduced to further streamline the process. The roll out will commence in the 2nd quarter of this year.

Should you require more information, please do not hesitate to contact Douglas J Cheah on 1300 88 84 88 or cheahdj@irwinsolutions.com.