Planning and designing a patient-centered measure for physician workload in the pediatric emergency department

Health Research BC is providing matching funds for this project, which is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Winter 2023 ICS Planning and Dissemination Grant – Supporting & Strengthening the Health Workforce stream.

Measuring the workload of pediatric emergency physicians is essential to help determine workforce needs, allocate resources to ensure timely care, assure patient safety, and diminish burnout. There are currently no widely accepted ways to measure pediatric emergency physician workload. Currently, staffing decisions are based on gestalt, availability, or average productivity measures that do not account for individual patient resource needs. This can lead to discrepancies in workload that affect both safety and efficiency and contribute to increased wait times and physician burnout. At a high level, a valid and reliable physician workload measure would help government agencies, universities, and hospital administrators identify and plan physician workforce needs and guide strategies for the training, recruitment, retention and allocation of the physician workforce. On a day-to-day and clinical level, this measure would allow for monitoring the workload of individual physicians in the emergency department (ED) and eventually, using machine learning (artificial intelligence) and linked healthcare data, could predict the workload for each patient that walks into the ED in order to assure a balanced, safe, and efficient assignment of patients. This grant will allow Canadian experts in pediatric emergency medicine, health services research, digital health, patient experience, and indigenous health to share knowledge and perspectives and establish a framework to derive and test a pediatric emergency physician workload measure in future planned research collaborations.

Dr. Quynh Doan is a clinician scientist in pediatric emergency medicine and health services research at the University of British Columbia. The multi-disciplinary team conducting this project has expertise in health services research, decision support systems, bioinformatics, implementation of research software projects, and clinical decision support.