Emergency department physicians spend only 25% of their working time on direct patient care

In modern hospital medicine, there is a growing awareness of the need for efficient and secure -patient care. Authorities seek to improve this by adding requirements for documentation, administrative tasks and standardized patient programmes. However, it is rarely investigated how much time physicians spend on these tasks and it is therefore difficult to assess how changes in the system might affect workflow and thus time efficacy. The aim of this study was to investigate how physicians in the emergency department (ED) of a public hospital in Denmark spend their time. Results were stratified for physicians working in the emergency room (ER) and the admission area of our ED.