Nurse Roster Management is a Critical Task in Health Services

Nurse Roster Management is a Critical Task in Health Services

Nurses must be available 24 hours at health care organizations. This means that shift working is an absolute necessity. However, available nurses cannot be arbitrarily rostered to shifts. Nurse roster management must accommodate the constraints on shift allocation, and other kinds of constraints such as nurses' entitlement to vacations and other kinds of absences.

Yet another problem is the skill mix of nurses. Nurses with the right mix of skills must be present during each shift. Otherwise, the quality of health care will suffer. On the other hand, employing too many staff to accommodate all contingencies will increase costs beyond acceptable levels. It is through effective nurse roster management that an attempt is made to meet both the quality and cost objectives.

The roster must be managed in a way that ensures reasonable allocation of duties among nurses. If too much burden is placed on a select few it can have two consequences. One, the quality of healthcare can suffer owing to the heavy and tiring workload on these few. Two, nurses are in high demand, and if they feel aggrieved with the rostering, they can look for other employment opportunities.

The Key Problem: Scheduling Nurses to Shifts

24-hour work is typically handled through three shifts, with a single nurse or group being assigned to a single shift. The typical shifts are early, late and night shifts of 8-hour duration each.

All the shifts are not popular shifts. In particular, the night shift is typically very unpopular, and is even considered to cause health problems. Consequently, available nurses must be rotated among different shifts in a way that all of them will be working equal numbers of popular, less popular and unpopular shifts.

The skill sets of the nurses must also be considered while developing the nurse roster. Then there is the problems posed by different kinds of absences, such as weekly offs, annual vacations, casual but expected absences and unexpected absences.

The nurse roster management system must handle all these requirements and generate rosters that meet the health care needs.

As can be visualized, nurse rostering is a complex exercise. You cannot expect to do a good job if you depend on a system of manual rostering, with a human scheduler developing the roster.

Typical Solutions: Nurse Roster Management Software and Temporary Staff

Nurse roster management software can be fed all the rules, constraints, details of available resources (such as number of nurses and their skill sets) and health care requirements. The system can also access the past rostering history of each nurse.

Based on the data thus made available, the nurse roster management system can work out schedules that not only meet healthcare requirements but also make best use of available nurses and skill sets.

Where available resources are not adequate to meet the requirements, the system can indicate additional staff requirements. It would then be possible to approach third party agencies that specialize in providing nurses (and other healthcare professionals) for short-term working. This is an expensive alternative, however, and the nurse roster management system would seek to minimize it.

Without good nurse roster management system, heavy recourse will typically be made to the third party agency services, increasing healthcare costs.

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Lucy Caudle, Marketing Manager at SMART, writes about the benefits of flexible

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