Authors: (including presenting author): :
Ng CM(1)
Affiliation: :
(1)Division of Urology, Department of Surgery, Princess Margaret Hospital
Introduction: :
Introduction In acute hospitals, managing medical staff leave, multi-tier on-call duties, supplementary healthcare service (SHS) assignments, and weekly shift rostering remains highly challenging. Traditional manual or spreadsheet-based approaches are labour-intensive, error-prone, and may result in inequitable workloads, contributing to burnout and disruptions in 24/7 patient care. Commercial electronic systems often fail to meet Hong Kong public healthcare needs, including multi-tier on-call structures, tier- and team-specific leave quotas, flexible cluster/hospital planning, staff self-requests, tailored SHS management, and integrated weekly roster building. This project developed a custom Flask-based web application tailored for a medical team in an acute hospital, delivering intuitive self-service tools, automated fairness-driven scheduling (monthly on-call and weekly shifts), and real-time transparency.
Objectives: :
To design, implement, and deploy a secure, user-centred web system that automates leave management, multi-tier on-call rostering, SHS assignments, and weekly shift rostering; reduces administrative workload; enhances equity and staff satisfaction; and ensures reliable clinical coverage aligned with local operational realities.
Methodology: :
Built with Python/Flask and SQLite, development followed a user-driven process. Requirements are gathered from medical staff, and leaders pinpoint the pain points in monthly on-call and duty planning. Core modules developed included secure role-based login, interactive colour-coded monthly calendar showing the manpower status of each day, self-service requests for leave/on-call/no-call/no-SHS with conflict handling, admin tools for user/team/tier/quota/SHS/call-list-rule management, a custom monthly on-call algorithm (constraint-respecting, preference-prioritising, fairness-optimised). Based on the information from the leave and call duty system, an interactive weekly roster builder sets the duty arrangement, performs staff availability checks, and facilitates staff duty assignments. Further refinement with Urology team feedback enhanced usability, visual alerts, cross-month continuity, remark collaboration, tier flexibility, and weekly roster intuitiveness. Rigorous testing with realistic data preceded prototype deployment.
Result & Outcome: :
The system had been successfully deployed as a prototype across multiple Urology teams (including cluster settings), replacing manual processes. The time used for monthly on-call generation reduced from hours to a few minutes, with fairness optimisation and manpower risk flagging, while allowing flexible rule setting and respecting staff preferences/requests. The weekly roster builder provides a user-friendly interface for staff duty assignment. Real-time transparency is provided to the teams via calendar, personal statistics (calls, leave, no-call), collaborative remarks, and Excel-exportable monthly call lists & weekly duty rosters. The platform markedly improves efficiency, equity, engagement, and reliability. As a cost-effective, locally tailored solution, it offers strong potential for wider Hospital Authority adoption.
