Teamwork By Design: Scheduling Tools for Physicists
Description
Clinical medical physics teams face increasing complexity in managing routine tasks, special procedures, and development projects across multiple sites and team members. Ensuring equitable workload distribution and effective collaboration is essential for maintaining quality, transparency, and staff well-being. This session presents practical tools and frameworks developed and implemented in academic and clinical settings to address these challenges. We will explore a novel workload distribution system based on the “normalized total effort” (nTE) metric, which uses a standardized unit called the “equivalent workday” (eWD) to quantify and balance clinical responsibilities. This system has demonstrated significant improvements in workload equity, reducing disparities from 50% to under 5% among physicists. Additionally, we will discuss the use of scheduling tools to streamline clinical coverage, automate shift assignments, and improve transparency in scheduling across large departments or multi-site systems. The experience of several users will be described in commissioning a scheduling system and describe the resulting benefits.