BACKGROUND The intensive physical and psychological stress of emergency medicine has evoked concerns about whether emergency physicians could work in the emergency department for their entire careers. Results of previous studies of the attrition rates of emergency physicians are conflicting, but the study samples and designs were limited. OBJECTIVE To use National Health Insurance claims data...

This paper introduces the problem of scheduling emergency room physicians. We interviewed physicians from six hospitals in the greater Montreal, Canada area, in order to understand the emergency room scheduling problem. Extracting the real scheduling problem is difficult because physician working conditions are based on informal mutual cooperation which is usually not documented. We present the...

Pregnant emergency physicians have unique needs that may not be explicitly addressed by departmental policy or culture within emergency departments (EDs). Essentially, the issue is how to optimize the health and safety of pregnant emergency physicians and their offspring. The policy Accommodating Pregnant Emergency Physicians: A Guiding Document, which our department developed and implemented (...

This study documents features of clinical departments in teaching hospitals that are using physician assistants (PAs) and nurse practitioners (NPs) to perform some tasks previously done by medical or surgical residents. More than 60 percent of teaching hospital medical directors surveyed reported experience with substitution in their hospitals. The experience overall appears to be positive; one...