Pediatric hospital medicine FTEs and staffing models.

Abstract

Appropriate physician staffing is essential to providing safe, high-quality care for hospitalized children. Many challenges exist in achieving optimal staffing, including financial constraints, coverage of off-hour shifts, recruitment shortages, and building models that promote staff satisfaction and retention. Pediatric hospital medicine (PHM) program leadership must consider the structural needs of their program while building flexibility in their systems to create balanced and sustainable staffing models. With an evolving PHM landscape, these models will likely need to be adjusted over time. Detailed outlines of PHM staffing models, including full-time equivalent definitions, criteria for determining staffing needs, and data on the range of practice environments within the field, are limited in the current literature. Adding such detailed descriptions would be valuable to establish regional and national benchmarks.