To my fellow EM docs who do the scheduling for your group — what's the worst part of it?
I'm a community EM doc and the unofficial scheduler for our group. Have been for a few years. Every cycle it's the same loop with pulling last month's spreadsheet, copy-forward the rotation, manually rebalance AM/PM, try to honor day-off requests while keeping everyone happy, send it out, get six "can I trade with X?" texts within an hour.
I'm trying to understand whether what I hate about it is universal or just our group's spreadsheet being bad. So:
- What's the single most painful part of building or maintaining your group's schedule?
- What's the part of the published schedule providers complain about most?
- For groups with residents — what does your block scheduling hell look like?
Not selling anything in this post. I have been building a tool to make this less awful for our own group and I'm trying to figure out where the real pain is for other groups before I assume our spreadsheet is the universe. Genuinely just want to know what you'd want different. Excited to share what I've built with anyone who replies — DM is fine.