Weekend staffing in hospital setting

I am not a big fan of working weekends at well. I work for a hospital system that has two hospitals on opposite sides of town. Therefore, on weekends we are responsible for PT services for both of them. Total beds is probably a little more than half the size of your hospital between our two hospitals. What we have done is hire per diem PT's that are interested in working weekends. We have two of them which greatly reduces the amount of weekends we work. We also employ 11 PT's (combo of inpatient & oupatient who are in the inpatient pool for weekends), 7 PTA's and a pool of aides (mostly college stuidents). With all this staff, I generally have to work one weekend every 4-5 wks. We staff our weekends by staffing 1 PT , 2 PTA's, 1 aide and 1 oncall PT on Sat. On Sun we staff 1 PT, 1 PTA and have 1 PT or PTA on call. The oncall person only comes in if there is a high case load.  We only see BID paitents once on Sat an Sun and don't see QD patients on Sun unless they are considered high priority. This system has worked pretty well for us as we are usually done around 1 or 2 pm. As the case load grows we probably will have to add anothe stff member for the w/e. I guess having a large group of PTA's and the per diem PT's have helped with minimizing w/e. As far as being more visible, I don't think it has to mean having more staff visible. You can promote your department via inservices and presentations to hospital staff, community programs, etc. We also perform screenings on new admits which are recommended by nursing so this helps increase PT visibility as well. I hope this helps.