Abstract
More doctors would like to work parttime. Since research on fitting healthcare system design with the structure of parttime jobs is lacking, we studied how parttime work for medical doctors could be enabled from a system design perspective. A theoretical analysis was performed, illustrated by two case studies. We conclude that introducing parttime work can provide the opportunity for improving system design and, therewith, performance. From the case studies it seems that work redesign can enable parttime work, and at the same time improve system performance. Better managing variability in the system contributed to this. The case studies results also showed that systems characterized by different levels of variability fit with different work contracts.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0 ), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Molema, J.J.W., Groothuis, S., Baars, I.J. et al. Healthcare system design and parttime working doctors. Health Care Manage Sci 10, 365–371 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10729-007-9032-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10729-007-9032-9