Physician call scheduling
Call is the hardest part of a physician schedule and the part most tools treat as an afterthought — a shift like any other, with the awkwardness left to whoever is building it.
What makes call different
It is the undesirable slot. Nobody is indifferent about call, which means distribution is not a logistical question but a fairness one, and it is the thing a department will argue about for years.
It spans days. A 24-hour call period, a Friday-to-Monday weekend block, a week of home call — these are single commitments, not sequences of day shifts.
It has consequences for the days around it. Post-call protection is the rule that actually constrains the schedule: the shift after call matters more than the call itself.
It pools differently from clinical work. The people eligible for general call are not the same set as the people who staff a particular clinic, and a subspecialty may have its own pool with two members.
How this is handled
Pools, defined by eligibility
A call pool is whichever staff categories are eligible for a call shift template. That means a department can run general, subspecialty and backup call as separate pools, each with its own tally, and a person can belong to more than one without their counts being conflated.
Because staff categories are defined by the site rather than by the software, the pools match how the department actually describes itself.
Multi-day call as one shift
A weekend call block is one assignment with a real start and end. Rest intervals, consecutive-day counts and duty-hour arithmetic all see the whole span. There is no convention to remember and no chance of a swap moving one "day" of a three-day block.
Post-call protection as a hard rule
"At least 24 hours off after a 24-hour call period" is a hard rule, which means the generator will not produce a schedule that breaks it and a swap that would break it is refused with the reason given.
This is where email-arranged swaps silently damage a schedule: the swap looks fine, and the shift after the swapped call is the problem.
Weekends and holidays counted over years
Call equity over one quarter is easy and nearly meaningless. The tally window is yours to set, so a department can even out Christmas and Thanksgiving over several years — automatically, rather than by someone keeping a private list.
Equitable weekend and holiday rotation
Common questions
Can it handle several call pools in one department?
Yes. A pool is defined by which staff categories are eligible for a call shift template, so a department can run general call, subspecialty call and backup call as separate pools with separate tallies, including people who sit in more than one.
Does it support 24-hour and weekend-long call?
A multi-day shift is one shift with one start and one end. A Friday-to-Monday call block is a single 72-hour assignment, and rest calculations, duty-hour counts and tallies all treat it as the single span it is.