How to match patient demand to reception staffing levels and rostering
Most medical centres whether it is in primary care, specialists or allied have based their reception staff ratio on the number of practitioners consulting. This has been a long-standing metric as a way to match staffing levels to the number of practitioners on any given day.
Lean is all about focusing on the patient and how everything we do, even the way we staff centres should be based on patient numbers. If you are basing it on the practitioner to staff ratio, are you taking into account the patients who are booked in with nursing staff as well?
Takt Time Calculator
A way to match patient demand to reception staff is using the Takt time calculator to match activity against demand.
Takt is the German word for “metre”, “beat”, “rate” or “pace”. What is the “pace” of your patients at reception?
- Do you know how long it takes your staff to check in a patient, or at the end of a consultation to complete their billings, make any follow up appointments, answer any questions?
- Have you ever done a time audit to establish this to understand what the average time per patient is?
- Doesn’t it make more sense to base your staffing levels around patient demand to stop queues at the front desk or having staff waiting for patients to come in? Have you ever thought there is a better way to manage this?
The Takt Time Calculator is a simple method where you match the patient processing time (demand) to your staffing levels (available service time).
- The first step is to calculate the total minutes per day per staff member that is productive time.
Takt time = available service time / patient demand
This means deducting time for breaks, opening/closing procedures, shift change over time and admin tasks that don’t involve patient contact time, (e.g. scanning, banking, etc) from the total rostered time. - The second step is to do a time audit and calculate what time it takes to perform admin tasks or no patient contact tasks. Don’t guess, you need to measure it. As Peter Drucker states, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t change it”.
- The third step is to do a time audit to understand what the average time per patient at reception is to process them, both for check-in or check out.
- The fourth step is to put into the calculator how many patient appointments are available for each day.
Enter in all the data into the calculator. This will then give you a clear understanding of how many reception staff you need to have rostered per day to meet patient demand (see example below).
Takt Time Calculator | ||||
Hours | Mins | |||
Hours per Shift | 7.6 | 456 | ||
Break Time per Shift (paid) | 0.33 | 20 | ||
Opening/Closing Time per day | 0.5 | 30 | ||
Staff change over time | 0.3 | 20 | ||
Admin time (number patient contact) | 0.5 | 30 | ||
Total time remaining per day | 5.9 | 356.00 | ||
Mins | ||||
Available Time per Day per staff member | 356 | |||
Average patient service time (per patient) | 8 | |||
Number patients per day per staff member can service | Takt Time | 45 | ||
Number patient appointments scheduled per day for centre | 168 | |||
Number reception staff per day required | 3.8 | or 3.8*456 mins = 1,7328 mins (28.88 hours) | ||
(patient appointments per day/number patients per day staff can service) | ||||
You can take this a step further and do this per shift e.g. AM or PM, and even break this down to hours based on practitioner starting and finishing times per day (as they are generally staggered).
The above does not include phone call time or volume. Some centres have phone calls off reception so that reception staff can concentrate on the patients in front of them, others do both having reception answer the phones. We all know that at the beginning of the day, phone call volume demand is high. If you include phone call time, you will need to break this down further. Do you have a phone system that provides you data on this such as number of calls per hour, day, number of call dropouts/unanswered, average time per call, etc?
If you want some help in reviewing your resourcing levels to meet patient demand, please contact us today.
- Posted by admin-se
- On July 17, 2021
- 0 Comments