Maintaining Safe Staffing Levels in Healthcare 

May 26, 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light the serious healthcare staffing shortages we are dealing with. Having an abundance of qualified staff to fill every shift is no longer the norm. Working with safe staffing levels in healthcare facilities has become very challenging, and optimizing your workforce is becoming increasingly more important. Statistically speaking, more people are leaving healthcare jobs than coming into the field. For the majority of those leaving, they attribute poor staffing management as the #1 reason they chose to seek a new line of work.

You can’t expect better results by repeating a disorganized approach to creating and managing healthcare staff schedules. Throwing more people at your scheduling problems isn’t a good use of your resources, and it’s likely you don’t really have more people to throw at them anyway.

Senior level nurse with healthcare team standing in the background.

The right scheduling software solution can help you regroup and create a staff scheduling process that opens more capacity for senior staff to focus on what really matters: High Quality Patient Care. By streamlining your current scheduling process, you can more easily:

  • Stay below OT thresholds and meet target work hours.
  • Retain qualified and experienced staff.
  • Reallocate resources to better serve patient care.
  • Prevent overextending and burning out your workforce.
  • Reduce gaps in coverage and agency labor dependence.

While Schedule360 may not be able to solve the nursing shortage or keep nurses on staff, our nurse scheduling software can provide tools that make optimizing your current staff much easier. We provide an efficient proactive process for meeting patient demands, providing full schedule transparency, and an overall better work/life balance.

Optimize Resources Efficiently

Nurse scheduling software makes it possible to allocate your current resources more efficiently, and it starts with accurate reporting and forecasting. Scheduling needs can be dispatched quickly to all qualified and available staff to ensure adequate shift coverage, even in urgent situations.

The proper tools you need to optimize your staff aren’t available with every scheduling software solution. Automating tasks like employee shift swaps, self-scheduling, and OT alerts will relieve you of some of the greatest burdens associated with overseeing your healthcare staff schedule. It’s not like you’re walking away completely though. You still set the rules for which credentials can cover certain shifts, when and how much of the schedule can be self-scheduled, and whether OT requires approval before the shift can be filled by those approaching OT thresholds.

Complete Schedule Transparency

Simplified staffing solutions include having complete schedule transparency, including 24/7 access in real-time to all schedules from any mobile device with internet access. Schedule transparency eliminates common oversights and confusion and helps streamline the scheduling process without consuming your scheduler’s entire day with inquiries and manual tasks.

Segmented Messaging and Alert Capabilities

Our web-based nurse scheduling software includes a platform for messaging and provides admins with segmented messaging options based on current needs. Admins can select healthcare staff within one unit, department, facility, enterprise, or across multiple campuses.

Messages can be dispatched to employees scheduled to work that day, those who aren’t currently working but are available, or to everyone on the list. Segmented messaging improves all aspects of communication by sending scheduling requests or changes to staff in real-time via text, email, and message board messages, complete with timestamps to ensure they were delivered and read.

Automate Regularly Occurring Scheduling Tasks

Automate redundant, regularly occurring scheduling tasks with nurse scheduling software. Rules-based automation significantly helps you simplify and streamline any scheduling related task, including overtime monitoring and tracking compliance. Our nurse scheduling software makes it possible to achieve operational efficiency without draining your resources by automating repetitive, time-consuming scheduling tasks. Save time with self-scheduling, employee shift swaps, credential tracking, time-off requests, and so much more.

Utilize Configured Reporting Features for Real-Time Schedule Management

Real-time reports for target work hours and forecasting shift demands are much easier thanks to Schedule360. Our nurse scheduling software can uncover daily and weekly shift level patterns in patient flow through certain units, allowing schedulers to better forecast demand. Real-time reporting also makes forecasting demand possible. Integrated data compiling allows for one-click management of employee compliance to work targets.

Streamlining your scheduling process greatly frees up your schedulers and administrators during challenging, high-volume times, allowing you to allocate resources and staff more efficiently.

Ease of Implementation

Schedule360’s easy implementation process is designed to get you set up with a scheduling solution that’s configured to fit your needs right away. Throughout the implementation process and training we do all the heavy lifting of data entry for you and provide a step-by-step guided plan aimed to make the entire implementation process as stress-free and seamless as possible. The support doesn’t stop there. Our live customer support team is available 24/7 to ensure a successful transition long after your new system is up and running.

Maintain Safe Staffing with Schedule360

Nurse scheduling and rostering for healthcare facilities presents many challenges, especially during these challenging times. Schedule360’s nurse scheduling software solution helps healthcare organizations proactively and reactively tackle each scheduling related challenge by equipping them with powerful, robust features and instant, real-time access to key decision-making information. If you’re ready to take control of your staff scheduling and create more efficiency on every shift, contact us to schedule a configured demo. We Know Scheduling™, and we’re confident the time you invest in making this change will be well worth it.