By the time you read this, I will have completed a transition to working half-time. Now, I know a lot of docs out there think emergency docs are already only working half-time, so perhaps I ought to start with explaining why that isn’t the case, even if emergency physicians work fewer hours than many other physicians.
Let’s start with the fact that most Americans consider 35 to 40 hours a week to be a full-time job. A typical emergency physician works 12 twelve-hour shifts a month or 16 eight-hour shifts per month. Add an hour on to the end of each of those shifts “to clean up” and perhaps another half day at some other point in the month for administrative duties and you get to something around 150 hours per month, or about 1800 hours per year. Let’s compare that to a typical office worker with a 40 hour work week.
52 weeks a year x 40 hours per week = 2080 hours
That’s 280 hours more than our hypothetical emergency physician. But we’ve forgotten a few things. We haven’t considered the paid holidays. Emergency docs get paid holidays because they work on holidays! EDs are open 24/7/365, remember? If you’re working half the days in a month, you work half of the holidays in the year, and the other half were unpaid. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) the average professional worker gets 8.5 paid holidays a year. 8.5 days x 8 hours = 68 hours.
What about vacation? When emergency docs go on vacation, they cram their shifts into the rest of the month to free up time to go. There’s no “paid vacation.” They worked the exact same number of shifts in a month when they went on vacation as they did in a month when they did not. The BLS says the average professional worker gets about 17 days a year of paid vacation. So 17 x 8 = 136 hours.
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