Effective Scheduling Leads to Successful Hospital Staff Management
June 22, 2022
In the United States, more than 175,000 nurses graduate every year, yet we’ve been dealing with a nursing shortage for a long time. Nurses and support staff continue to feel overwhelmed and invisible through the daily grind. Gaps in coverage lead to overextended staff which creates mandatory overtime. At the same time, there are some staff who aren’t meeting their respective target work hours. Staff feel under appreciated, admins are doing their best to keep tabs on everything, and in the end, everyone is just trying to make it to the next shift. If the overtime isn’t busting your payroll budget, the agency labor required to maintain quality patient care certainly will.
Workforce management processes in healthcare have generally stayed the same through the years despite the rapid growth in healthcare needs. Some believe the answer is simple:
“We need more nurses and support staff.” Although adding more staff to the mix is always helpful, it isn’t going to make it easier to manage your staffing processes unless you have a system in place to optimize your staff. Facilities are finding it challenging to optimize their current workforce, and this underlying problem often leads to high turnover. Streamlining your current workflows, creating standard processes for common scheduling tasks, and real-time reporting can help you better allocate your resources and balance shifts. An organized approach starts with leveraging a configurable staff scheduling software that makes it easy for you to centralize your staff scheduling.
Hospital staff feel overwhelmed, overworked, and overlooked. Transparency in scheduling can mitigate a lot of these emotions. Boosting morale and valuing your resources is important if you want to develop a strong work team.
Investing in and implementing a scheduling software designed for your needs will save your unit money and improve work/life balance and morale for all employees.
Rules-Based Self-Scheduling
Self-scheduling features benefit schedulers and staff by saving time on scheduling tasks while providing staff with a sense of freedom and flexibility over their own work schedule. After shifts are released for the upcoming schedule and immediate booking of set scheduled shifts, any remaining shifts are made available for self-scheduling by qualified staff. Employees can pick up extra shifts and swap shifts within the rules and guidelines set by management. Self-scheduling features can be turned on or off for the entire department or per individual employee. Departments can also incorporate group rotations for preferential scheduling if desired.
Schedule Transparency
Schedule360 scheduling software provides complete schedule transparency, giving admins the ability to view the schedule in ways that makes managing schedules for multiple locations much easier. Employees can view their schedule 24/7 from any mobile device with internet access, resulting in fewer missed shifts and shift changes as they have more time to plan their personal lives around set work schedules.
Automated Tasks
Automating scheduling related tasks like employee shift swaps, self-scheduling, credential tracking, time-off requests, and keeping track of overtime with OT threshold alerts drastically reduces the amount of time spent on maintaining a hospital staff schedule. Optimize your healthcare workforce without sacrificing your time and resources so you can focus on better patient care.
Last Minute Shift Scheduling
Filling last-minute shift openings is an unfortunate pain point for schedulers, but Schedule360 can help ease the burden. Using our scheduling software, you can easily communicate any hot shift needs with your staff 12, 24, or 48 hours in advance using the internal messaging platform complete with time-stamped features notifying administrators that their message was received and read.
Easy Implementation Process
Schedule360’s stress-free implementation process is intended to get you up and running with a scheduling software solution configured to fit your exact, unique needs right away. With a configurable and scalable staff scheduling software, you can keep the processes that are working well for you and your staff, and overhaul others that aren’t making the cut.
We assign a dedicated Schedule360 representative to work closely with you to get an in-depth understanding of your unique scheduling needs, provide expert consultation, and coordinate setup with our IT team, training department, and account administration. Throughout the guided implementation and training process we do all the data entry for you and provide a step-by-step guided plan designed to make the implementation process as easy and seamless as possible.
Implementation doesn’t have to occur overnight either. There is zero pressure to implement Schedule360 into an entire facility all at once. You can ease into the process gradually at a pace that works best for you and your staff, even rolling it out unit by unit. Once you realize the benefits of streamlining your workflows in a configurable software solution designed for scheduling healthcare staff, we’re confident you’ll feel empowered with the ability to do more with less.
Effective Scheduling is Easy with Schedule360
Successful hospital staff management is easily mastered with the help of Schedule360 staff scheduling software. Our unique, scalable, centralized approach to scheduling is the answer to your biggest scheduling and staffing dilemmas. If you know your current processes aren’t working as well as they need to be, there’s no better time than now to make a positive change in your workforce management processes. Contact us for a configured demo today! Schedule360 – We Know Scheduling™