Streamlined Staff Scheduling Minimizes Fallout from Nursing Shortage

March 3, 2021

Nursing shortages pose unique challenges for healthcare facilities. It becomes a behind the scenes juggling act to keep overtime costs down, reduce agency needs, and prevent gaps in shift coverage while maintaining quality care to patients. Streamlining your scheduling process with a robust and configurable web-based solution can minimize the fallout due to short staffing. Optimizing your current staff with an organized and automated approach will keep your unit running efficiently.

Easy Implementation Process

Schedule360’s user-friendly implementation process is designed to get you set up with a staff scheduling software solution configured to fit your needs. We assign a dedicated Schedule360 representative to work with you to understand your unique scheduling needs, provide expert consultation, and coordinate your setup with our IT team, training department, and account administration. Through the implementation process and training we handle the data entry for you and provide you with a step by step guided plan. A solution to your scheduling and labor management pain points won’t do much good if your team is burdened by the set-up. We’ll do the heavy lifting so you and your team can focus on more important things.

Self-Scheduling Opportunities

Our staff software solution includes rules-based self-scheduling if you choose. After you release shifts for the upcoming schedule and automated, immediate booking of set schedule shifts, any remaining open shifts are available for self-scheduling by unit-based staff who qualify. Self-scheduling reduces time spent on staff scheduling, while still ensuring that individual work targets are met and safe levels of staffing are occurring. Management still defines setup, and features can be turned on and off for the entire department, or per employee. You can even allow OT upon approval, so if someone wants to work more they can, and you can proactively control how much OT is being paid out per period.

Reduced Agency Dependence

Schedule360’s staff scheduling software is the most advanced, clinically focused nursing shortage solution with numerous innovative features designed to optimize staff scheduling while always ensuring you have the proper staff coverage. With the ability to see the entire schedule at a glance, including OT thresholds and deficits in target work hours, you can optimize your current nursing staff and lessen agency dependence. This way, you’re only using agency staff when it’s absolutely necessary rather than as a process of convenience.

Hot Shift Scheduling

A platform-based messaging system that allows you to segment messages based on a variety of criteria will enable efficient handling of last-minute critical scheduling needs. Choose to send an urgent message for gaps in coverage to all qualified employees, employees below their target work hours, or those looking to pick up more hours to ensure optimal shift coverage, in any situation.

Credential Tracking

With the right software, licensure and skills can be stored in employee profiles, and this will have several benefits. Reminders for renewals will decrease the occurrences of lapses in credentials, and you can ensure balanced shifts by only allowing those with the same skills sets to cover for each other. When gaps occur, you can see at a glance which skills the shift will require, and segmented messaging followed by agency requests will allow you to continue providing the care needed for positive patient experiences.

Allowable Shift Swaps

Self-scheduling provides nurses with more control over their schedules and this benefits everyone. The transparency your scheduling software will provide keeps everyone on the same page and under the same guidelines. With a rules-based system, self-scheduling will put your staff in the driver’s seat and allowing them to have more control results in less time-off requests, less gaps in coverage, and less shift-swapping.

Proactive Scheduling

Staff scheduling software with integrated reports in real-time allows one-click management of employee compliance to work targets and enables rapid schedule management. With proper data organization and variable reporting options, you can forecast staffing needs more efficiently and accurately. It’s easier to keep your schedule organized if you’re optimizing it from the start instead of reacting to changes and gaps in coverage as they come.

Schedule Transparency

Web-based staff scheduling software provides full schedule transparency by giving admins, staff, and schedulers the ability to view the schedule in real-time, 24/7, all in one place.

Schedule360 software is an advanced, clinically focused scheduling solution that supports the assignment of proper staff to patients along with balanced workload distribution. While there is no quick fix for the nursing shortage, staff scheduling software by Schedule360 delivers solutions that are sure to make your health care facility run more efficiently by optimizing your current staff. We’d love to show you how it works. Contact us for a configured demo of our award-winning software.