PA On-call Coverage Compensation

[PA2011]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm in need of some advice. I'm a hospital physician assistant who gets paid for my 37.5 hours per week. I've been working at this hospital for 5 years, working four 10 hour shifts as well as providing on call coverage (over the phone, never have to come in to the hospital) for the neurology department at my hospital (which is actually an outpatient practice of 10 neurologists). The PAs cover 4 calls per month, each call is 14 hours of coverage. We cover inpatient as well as outpatient calls which can be anywhere from 15 to 40+ calls per night. 

 

We are not compensated for these extra hours that we spend speaking to the ER, RNs, outpatients, etc on the phone. Our base salary definitely does not cover these calls because our salary is under 90k in 2016 in NJ where the average is closer to 102k+ at this time. The calls have progressively been getting worse and because we don't get post-call days off, we have not been sleeping at night and then going in to work at the hospital for 10 hours. It is affecting our quality of life and so we finally set up an appointment to meet with the medical director. 

 

Does any one have experience with on call compensation similar to this? How much compensation should we ask for? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[ventana]

You are being taken advantage of

 

 

Call has two components -

1) the telephone call

a)that does not generate revenue but is required to be in the hospital

b)the outpatient call which does not even need to be handle

2) Going in and working - doing ANYTHING that is billable

 

 

For #1it is a quality of life issue and they will try to say that you should just do it. My answer to this is that it needs to be paid as it is effecting YOUR quality of life. Offer that if there truly is no problems with it - suggest that the doc's do it all "cause obviously it is not that big of a deal".

 

For #2 - if the practice makes money - YOU need to be paid. Period, no argument.

 

 

 

 

Overall another Trend that has happened. Doc's, especially specialist, are now demanding to be paid by the hospital systems for call coverage. Not in all places but many. If this is the case in your system. (Might be tough to find out) then you deserve to be paid./

 

 

A final argument is that if they want to compensate you at the level of a physician then you will provide the same level of care/commitment with call.

 

 

 

You are being taken HUGE advantage of - ALL PAs and NPs working under this system need to stand together and bring this up as an issue. It is INSANE to being doing this for free and you need to correct the situation or get a different job....

[rev ronin]

As an ex-IT person, my call pay expectation is one hour for four just for being available, plus my normal rate for actual time spent.  So if I were on call from 6 PM to 6 AM, and did 2 hours worth of work, that would be 5 hours of straight time pay.  Mind you, that's IT world.  Never wanted a job in medicine that involved call, since the compensation is so rotten compared to what I'm used to.