Are you a slow, unproductive emergency physician?

Barely a week goes by without someone in my department complaining about the work-rate of Dr X. Work rate is a difficult measure as it's so multifactorial, but on recently discovering the average work rate of some junior doctors to be less than 0.75 patients per hour I was more inclined to listen to some of the complaints. So, the paper by Vukmir is really interesting, looking as it does at efficiency and value in different US facilities, (see page 916). Not only does this give us an insight into the performance of US emergency physicians, it also show that experience is valuable (I like to think of that as a trained senior doctor). Those of you who read the Temple report ‘Time for Training’, will know that there is plenty of evidence and opinion out there to support the increase in the professionalisation and seniority of ED staff. While as emergency physicians we argue most strongly for the quality argument to support this the …