Medical practitioner—hours worked, total NNN

Identifying and definitional attributes
Metadata item type:	Data Element
Short name:	Total hours worked by a medical practitioner
METEOR identifier:	270136
Registration status:	Health, Superseded 10/12/2009
Definition:	The total hours worked in a week in a job by a medical practitioner, including any on-call hours actually worked (includes patient care and administration).
Context:	Health labour force
Data Element Concept:	Medical practitioner—hours worked

Value domain attributes

Representational attributes

Representation class:

Total

Data type:

String

Format:

NNN

Maximum character length:

Supplementary values:

Value	Meaning
999	Not stated/inadequately described

Unit of measure:

Hour (h)

Collection and usage attributes

Guide for use:

Total hours expressed as 000, 001 etc.

Data element attributes

Collection and usage attributes

Guide for use:

This metadata item relates to each position (job) held by a medical practitioner, not the aggregate of hours worked in all.

Collection methods:

There are inherent problems in asking for information on number of hours usually worked per week, for example, reaching a satisfactory definition and communicating this definition to the respondents in a self-administered survey. Whether hours worked are collected for main job only, or main job and one or more additional jobs, it is important that a total for all jobs is included.

Comments:

It is often argued that health professionals contribute a considerable amount of time to voluntary professional work and that this component needs to be identified. This should be considered as an additional item, and kept segregated from data on paid hours worked.