On-call weekends in medicine are often busy: having to respond to “bleeps” whilst sorting out through long lists of jobs and clinical reviews handed over by the weekday teams can be a stressful experience for junior members of the team. The time spent to prioritise patients to be reviewed and tasks is time subtracted to direct patient care. On top of that, decisions made on the basis of incomplete information may lead to incorrect prioritization and delays in reviewing sick patients.
The setting where this project took place consisted of a district general hospital in the outskirts of London, with approximately 500 inpatient beds. The medical division is composed of ten general medical wards and two acute medical wards. In addition, the on-call medical team also covers a haematology/ oncology ward, a Coronary Care Unit, medical outliers in the Hyper Acute Stroke Unit and surgical wards. Each ward has an average of 20 beds
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