Hospital on-call duty: Solidarity often pays off!

Olivier S Descamps, Marie Boland, Alexandre Niset, Annaelle Doyen, Simon De Vetter, Nora El Khawand, Julie Harmant, Inès Thiebaut, Sarah Will, Rayane Laghmiche, Hugo Pierret, Victor Simon Published in the journal : April 2024 Category : Économie de la santé

This article has attempted to address a contentious issue regarding on-call duty allocation in hospitals. Let us consider a hospital scenario with 20 clinical specialist assistant candidates (MACCS), consisting of 10 juniors in their core year of general internal medicine and 10 seniors specializing in areas like cardiology, gastroenterology, pneumology, etc. These MACCS are distributed across various departments, each comprising 1 to 5 MACCS, with varying proportions of juniors and seniors. Every night or weekend, one of these doctors had to be on call to provide permanent hospital patient care that was followed by a recuperation day. A discussion is currently underway as to whether senior MACCS should participate as much as junior MACCS in on-call duty. These senior MACCS receive 12% higher remuneration than younger staff, while they assist doctors in carrying out technical examinations during the day as part of their training. Will it cost more to the institution if the 10 senior staff members take part in general on-call duty? How will their absence during recuperation affect their work and training? Would departments with more senior staff face disadvantages? How would you address these questions? Some might be rather pessimistic, but how does it actually look reality?

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