How to Keep Nurse Scheduling Challenges from Impacting Patient Care

January 7, 2022

When faced with scheduling challenges, many nurse schedulers find themselves in a bit of an information-gathering quandary. Agency labor must fit certain requirements that may vary depending on position, department, location, or certification. Finding a suitable replacement for urgent gaps in coverage while maintaining mandated staffing levels requires much more than skilled nursing managers. You need the right tools to streamline your scheduling processes.

Successful healthcare facilities rely on the ability to automate time-consuming tasks, such as staff scheduling, credential tracking, and communications whenever possible. Manually creating and overseeing department staff schedules is cumbersome and inefficient. By utilizing configurable staff scheduling software, your most valuable resources can be easily optimized.

A robust and scalable software solution can help by automating arduous and redundant scheduling tasks with guidelines set by management. A staff scheduling solution tailored to the unique needs of healthcare staff workflows will include internal segmented messaging and provide transparency, accountability, and standard processes for your unit.

Credential Tracking

Our nurse scheduling software provides the ability to track employee credentials and licensure. This ensures that only those staff with the proper credentials and qualifications are filling certain shifts. Skills that require recertification are tracked from the expiration date and our internal messaging capabilities allow management to set automatic alerts to employees 60 days prior to expiration. This can be linked back to the Credential page for rapid updating. Each unit or facility has the ability during set-up to disallow employees with expired or missing credentials from signing up for shifts or even being offered shifts they aren’t qualified to work. With a little guided set up, you can ensure balanced coverage on every shift without the need for manual review and approval for self-scheduling and shift swaps.

Self-Scheduling

Give your nursing staff flexibility over their schedules with our rules-based self-scheduling feature. Flexible scheduling practices always ensure maximum shift coverage. Management still defines the rules and guidelines based on the specific processes of your unit or facility. By simply automating your scheduling process, you’re freeing up more time to reallocate your resources where they are better served. You’re also boosting employee morale as they’ll appreciate being able to take a more active role in their own scheduling for a great work/life balance.

Shift Swapping

Allowable shift swaps give your nurses the power to make their own shift trades with other nurses who hold the same credentials. Shift swapping gives nurses more balance over their work and personal lives, while still ensuring safe staffing levels are occurring. In addition, shift swapping saves your schedulers hours of work by allowing employees to swap shifts with each other while still giving management the ability to set rules and guidelines. Once set, these guidelines you created will ensure only those who are qualified to fill the open shift can sign into it. Just another example of how the right scheduling software can lead to more efficient workflows through rules-based automation.

Web-Based 24/7

Our nurse scheduling software provides full access to real-time scheduling anytime, anywhere. 24/7 web-based access to real-time schedules makes it easier to forecast demands, view real-time reports at-a-glance, and safe staffing levels are easier to manage, even during an emergency. Providing 24/7 web-based access to all employees keeps everyone on the same page, even as changes occur. Having content and happy nurses will improve the quality of patient care being delivered and will make a positive impact on your entire workforce.

Internal Messaging

Internal messaging is invaluable, especially in times of urgency. We understand the importance of being able to quickly communicate urgent scheduling needs to your staff, so our software solution includes an internal messaging tool along with enhanced messaging capabilities allowing you to segment messages to only relevant staff. In doing so you avoid over-messaging that can sometimes lead to ignored or unopened messages. Messages are time-stamped for accountability, so admins won’t be left in the dark as to who has read (or not read) urgent, real-time communications.

Streamline for Efficiency

Allocate resources fast and efficiently for the best patient care. You already understand how important it is to ensure that employees aren’t working outside of their licensure, credentials, and skills, so our nurse scheduling software solution provides user-friendly features that can assist you. Schedule360 keeps you informed with a broad view of the big picture and real-time scheduling needs with one click.

Automated Tasks

To achieve operational efficiency, every resource needs to be optimized, but to do that, you need the ability to measure, track, and report time, attendance, and shortages. Without the proper tools, this can be a difficult and time-consuming process especially if you’re still resorting to outdated scheduling methods. Automating tasks such as employee self-scheduling, shift swaps, credential tracking, time-off requests, and tracking overtime can drastically reduce the amount of time spent on maintaining the schedule.

Experience Equals Better Outcomes

How well do you understand nurse scheduling problems? While searching for a software solution, you’ll want to find a company that understands the challenges you face as a nursing manager. While there are plenty of scheduling software vendors available to choose from, not all of them specialize in healthcare scheduling. Schedule360 can offer expert advice and best practices for solving common nurse scheduling problems in addition to your other clinical support staff. An experienced vendor will help you establish a good workflow since they have experience with the unique burdens nursing managers face every day.

The Solution for Nurse Scheduling Starts Here

If you’re burdened by your scheduling tasks, but you feel like there is no way you could implement something new, even if it would elevate your stress and frustration, let’s talk. We take on the bulk of the data entry through installation, training, and configuration because we want to bring you a simplified solution, not one more thing to juggle. With the features and configurability built into our staff scheduling software, we know it will save you time and resources when creating your nurse schedules. We offer the proper scheduling tools you need to help you better manage and track staffing demands in real-time. Reduce turnover attributed to staffing inefficiencies which can negatively impact patient care and staff morale by implementing Schedule360 in your unit.

We offer a configured demo of our award-winning nurse scheduling software so you can see first-hand exactly how well our scheduling solution can fit into your current processes seamlessly. We Know Scheduling™, and we know we can make your scheduling process better. Contact Schedule360 today to learn more.