This article is an excerpt from the Changes & Challenges report.
“While past generations of optometrists and ophthalmologists routinely worked 60 to 70 hours per week, today’s doctors are prioritizing work-life balance, typically logging 36 to 40 hours weekly,” says Richard Edlow, OD. There’s no judgment in that statement; it’s a reflection that the shift in hours significantly impacts the labor supply.
This shift furthermore complicates the calculations of full-time equivalent or FTE optometrists and workforce capacity. FTE is a standardized measurement to quantify workforce capacity by combining part-time and full-time into a uniform metric. This measurement creates bench- marks for productivity and capacity. Internally, this metric can be used to ensure proportional workforce costs and estimate future workforce needs.
For example, a practice owner who wants two employees on site from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. five days a week, plus three hours on Saturdays has the need to cover 86 hours plus three. The most simple formula would be that the doctor needs 2.15 FTEs. Yet FTE calculations can oversimplify the equation, ignoring qualitative factors like experience, specialty areas and complexity of patient care.
DEFINITIONS
A full-time equivalent or FTE is valued at 2,080 hours a year (8 hours a day x 5 days a week x 52 weeks). Others may calculate it differently. For example, if a company’s full-time employees work 40 hours or 37.5 hours or 35 hours a week, then that number is the measure of the FTE. In the 40 hour per week scenario, if one full-time person works 40 hours and two part-time employees work 20 hours each, that’s generally seen as two FTEs.
To complicate the matter just a bit more, the Affordable Care Act defines 30 hours a week or 130 hours a month as an FTE. In health care, FTEs are often calculated by the number of hours that person is providing direct clinical care. Nonclinical contributions are excluded. So the OD who works three days in the practice and two days on the practice would be considered as a 0.6 FTE.
Finally, FTE calculations may become a less relevant measure of operational capacity as artificial intelligence and other technologies that support automation, efficiency or remote optometry grow in acceptance.
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The Changes & Challenges report is supported by Alcon.
