MPH 598 Week 2 Workload Audit Example

Workload Audit: Four Weeks of a Respiratory Therapist's Committed Hours, Taken From Pay Stubs, the Unit Schedule and a Phone Calendar

Student Name

Chamberlain University

MPH 598: Student Success and Self-Care

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Workload Audit: Four Weeks of a Respiratory Therapist's Committed Hours, Taken From Pay Stubs, the Unit Schedule and a Phone Calendar

What This Audit Covers and Where the Figures Came From

This audit records every committed hour in four weeks of my life, from the Monday the term began to the Sunday before this assignment was due. I am a respiratory therapist working rotating 12-hour night shifts at a regional hospital, a parent of a 7-year-old and the main helper for my grandmother. Each line in the ledger below carries three things: the hours, the document the figure came from and what it would take to move them. Paid work comes from my pay stubs and the unit's time clock records, not from the schedule, because a rostered shift and a worked shift are not the same length. Sleep after nights comes from my phone's sleep log. Family commitments come from the shared family calendar and my grandmother's pharmacy and appointment records. Coursework comes from the learning system's activity log and my own timer.

The Ledger

Table 1

Committed Hours Over Four Weeks, With Sources

Note. Note. Figures are the writer's own composite records for this course; a four-week period has 672 hours.

Worked Length, Not Rostered Length

The contract says 36 hours a week, three shifts of 12 hours. The time clock records say otherwise. Across 12 shifts, the average worked length was 12 hours and 50 minutes: report starts 15 minutes before 7 p.m., and on 9 of the 12 mornings I left after 7:30 a.m. because of late ventilator weaning, a rapid response or a delayed handover. If I had built this audit from the contract, I would have missed about 10 hours of work and, with it, the later start of my recovery sleep on those mornings.

Recovery Is a Commitment

The 78 hours of sleep after nights are the line most audits leave out or count as free time. They are not free. When I tried in the first week to study at 3 p.m. after a night, I read the same page of the epidemiology chapter three times. Night-shift recovery is a fixed cost of the job. Maslach and Leiter (2016) describe exhaustion as the central strain in burnout, and it is the first thing I would feed if I treated recovery as available time. In this audit, recovery is counted as committed, and the hours after waking on a post-night day are treated as low-quality time suitable only for light tasks.

Where Two Things Sit Together

Some hours hold two commitments at once. Driving my grandmother to the pharmacy is also the time I hear about her week, which is part of looking after her. Bedtime with my daughter is family time and also the end of my own evening, after which I have about 90 minutes before I need to sleep on a non-shift night. And two of my coursework hours each week happen during quiet stretches at work, when there are no ventilator changes or rapid responses, which my manager allows but which can end at any moment. I have counted those two hours as coursework but marked them as unreliable.

Fragments, Not a Total

The total of committed hours over the four weeks is 477.8, leaving 194.2 hours unaccounted for. That figure is misleading on its own, because the remaining time is not a block. It comes in pieces: 20 minutes between school drop-off and sleep, an hour on a Saturday afternoon when my daughter is at a friend's, the 90 minutes after bedtime on non-shift nights. When I mapped the remaining hours onto the calendar, only 11 blocks of 2 hours or more existed across the four weeks, and 7 of those fell on the two days a week when I was neither working nor recovering. The course, which needs about 12 hours a week, has to fit mainly into those blocks.

What the Audit Shows

Three things stand out. Work runs about 7% longer than the schedule says. Recovery takes almost as many hours as the shifts themselves and cannot be moved. And study time arrives in scraps, concentrated on the two days a week when I neither work nor recover. These points will guide the constraint analysis next week, which will look for the one commitment whose change would add the most usable time.

How the Records Were Gathered

Building the ledger took about three hours, spread over two evenings. The time clock records came from the hospital's employee portal, which shows punch-in and punch-out times for each shift; I copied them into a spreadsheet rather than relying on the pay stub totals, which round to the quarter hour. The phone's sleep log records when the phone was last used before sleep and when it was first picked up, which slightly overstates sleep on nights when I lay awake, so I compared it with my own notes for one week and found it about 20 minutes generous per sleep period. I adjusted the sleep figures down accordingly. Family and grandmother commitments came from the shared calendar my partner and I use, and I checked the grandmother line against the pharmacy's pickup receipts. Coursework hours came from the learning system's log, which shows time logged in, and a timer I ran while reading offline.

What the Audit Cannot Show

The ledger records time, not energy. Two hours on a Friday morning after a full night's sleep are worth more for writing than two hours on a Wednesday afternoon after a night shift, and the ledger treats them the same. The fragment analysis partly corrects for this by counting only two-hour blocks, but it does not capture how alert I was in each block. A second limit is that four weeks may not be typical: one week included a school holiday, which added three hours of childcare, and none included an illness in the family. The constraint analysis should therefore treat these figures as an ordinary month, not a worst case.

References

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103-111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311