New ‘Supervision’ module

In many clinical environments, rostering is more than just who is working on what activity. There are many times and situations when junior doctors, or doctors working out of their normal domain, need to have a designated supervisor.

HosPortal now has a powerful and flexible new feature to identify people who need to be supervised and who is supervising them. The supervision status is visible to roster administrators on each roster page and on the admin dashboard. Supervisors and their 'trainees' (although they can be any type of person) also see the connecting relationship on their own dashboards.

In building our features, we have looked at the types of supervision that are specified by medical colleges, such as ANZCA which defines four levels of supervision (‘immediate intervention’, ‘rapid intervention’, ‘available on-site’ and ‘available off-site’); or the Medical Board of Australia that has similar definitions for International Medical Graduates or IMGs (‘the supervisor is directly responsible for the patient’, ‘the supervisor shares responsibility for the patient’, ‘the IMG has responsibility for the patient but the supervisor is available by phone’ and ‘the supervisor must be available for consultation’).

Administrators can user our flexible rules engine to easily build and maintain supervision rules and supervision relationships. HosPortal will then maintain the relationships - in some cases automatically - and report on where someone is not appropriately supervised.

For instance you can define that the following people need supervision:

• All Interns

• Registrars doing an overnight shift on a specific roster

• Consultants doing a paediatric activity without a 'paediatric' skill

For each of these people needing supervision, the rules can consider the requirements of a supervisor, based on their role, skill or activity. For instance, the supervisor might be defined to be:

• Any Consultant

• Any Consultant staffed on the 'Duty Manager' shift on the same day.

• The doctor, of any role, staffed on the 'First On Call' roster that day

• A Consultant with a 'paediatric' skill.

All our users can now access this feature from the Admin page on HosPortal.

If you are a new or existing user, please get in touch if you want to find out more.