Given this assessment, we undertook to develop more sophisticated methods of workload analysis for operational team environments.
Despite this evolution of radiolgists' centrality in patient care, manpower planning in radiology has tended to rely on out-dated methods of workload measurement, often based on crude measures of numbers of studies reported per Consultant.
The RCR document on Workload and Manpower in Clinical Radiology produced in 1999 (superseding the 1990 document) recognised that this old-fashioned method of calculating workload was no longer appropriate [5].
Given this finding, the Faculty of Radiologists strongly recommends that the method of radiologist workload measurement used in this survey should form the basis for all future such measurement in Ireland, replacing other, less robust and less reproducible methods that have been used in the past.
A very popular method of evaluating user workload is to employ subjective questionnaires which are administered to the participant either during1 or after2 the activity of interest.
The aim of this study was to pilot the use of a new method of measuring mental workload using a previously published study design.
Regardless of the health care system and methods of determining necessary radiologist numbers, we felt that the exercise described in this paper would be of interest to radiologists in any health care system, in Europe and elsewhere, as a reproducible method of determining Radiologist workload, validated by almost nationwide data from the public Irish hospital system.
It is shown through the example that in comparison with the conventional method, the use of the present method results in the reduction of workload above 90%.
This has become the standard method of allocating and recording workload among teams.
The predictive validity of this method of measuring hospital nurses' workloads has been established by the University of Pennsylvania [ 10, 13, 34, 35].
