Efforts to strengthening organization management system of medical assistants at our hospital

Abstract

Physicians' overtime hours are a major issue especially in acute care hospitals.
Since fiscal year 2008, our hospital introduced medical assistants (MA) from the former East-West citizen's hospital and has been mainly focusing on outpatient clinical assistance work. We have strengthened the organization management system of MA and introduced the SMA (Special Medical Assistant) system as advanced level MA, and we have reduced the burden on physicians (69 physicians as of October 2018).
In our hospital, we have reviewed and reorganized our organizational structure of MA, staff training method, introduction of team system and ability evaluation method and have been putting it into practice. In addition, overtime hours of physicians before and after introduction of SMA tended to decrease. From now on, it is necessary to practice various efforts for motivation improvement of MA.