How to Solve the Nurse Scheduling Problem

For most companies that operate outside the healthcare sector, little time and limited resources are spent tackling issues like recurring overtime and absenteeism. These issues, however, represent a routine problem for most hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, long-term care facilities, and other primary care institutions across Canada and, if neglected, can prove costly.

Understanding Key Concerns

Managing a nursing schedule includes meeting unit rotation resourcing requirements, staying within FTE and budget allocations, adhering to various regulations, ensuring an appropriate skill mix, and responding to unplanned absences and changes to the schedule in a timely and efficient manner. Despite schedulers’ best efforts, nurses often end up working shifts that do not fully respect agreements or rotation constraints, or simply do not address employee requests like absences and shift swaps.

One of the more significant concerns for nurses is receiving a fair and equitable workload. However, healthcare decision-makers must juggle these concerns with many others to ensure seamless care delivery and budget adherence. Administrators must constantly balance the organization’s goals and budget with the demands of its nursing staff and unions – a difficult task when staff can total in the hundreds, and individual requests in the thousands. As a result, managers must find new ways to optimize scheduling to not only control operational costs, but also to increase employee engagement, productivity, and performance. Successfully addressing these employee satisfaction factors for nursing staff ultimately improves patient care.

The Multi-Level Impact of Inefficient Scheduling

Overtime is pervasive within the nursing occupation and contributes significantly to lower engagement, productivity, and performance. Respecting work-life balance by preventing uneven workload distribution is a priority.

Scheduling preferences and special requests are communicated in multiple forms, typically managed by the scheduler or nurse manager of a particular unit. However, healthcare organizations are often unable to manage these requests effectively due to inefficient manual processes and disparate systems. Most organizations lack a unified communication portal between nurses and schedulers, often communicating manually through a variety of channels. This process is highly impractical, causing imbalanced schedules, uneven workloads, overtime situations, and special requests going unfulfilled. Consider that nursing time spent meeting scheduling needs decreases time available to focus on delivering high-quality patient care.

Cost-containment and efficiency are essential in every healthcare sector. They are priorities for executives and administrators who focus their time and effort on strategic planning, managing operating costs, and ensuring optimal performance and productivity among employees.

With a growing need to more efficiently manage HR resources, healthcare organization executives are considering better tools to support the decision-making process. However, developing long-term growth strategies is challenging when daily scheduling issues demand attention. Improving scheduling efficiencies to minimize negative impacts on staff performance and patient care delivery is paramount.

A Fully Digitized Nurse Scheduling Solution

The challenges inherent to the nursing schedule process result in care teams spread too thin while schedulers, managers, and administrators scramble to maintain staffing levels that meet workload demands and patient acuity. Fortunately, there is a simple solution – Lumevi Scheduling (S&A). It keeps healthcare organizations on budget and labor costs under control, while promoting employee well-being.

Leveraging extensive healthcare and technology expertise, Lumevi understands that a streamlined digitized scheduling process improves communication, reduces absenteeism and overtime, and supports the effective delivery of patient care. Lumevi Scheduling empowers managers and administrators to optimize nursing resources and reduce redundant overhead costs. Nurses receive more equitable work schedules using robust scheduling rules that adhere to complex collective agreements and provide overtime awareness. In addition, nurses are empowered with tools to effectively communicate with schedulers and managers, easily indicating availability preferences, vacation planning, leave requests, and shift swap requests directly on their work schedules.

A Better Way Forward with All-In-One Scheduling

People at all tiers of a healthcare organization — nurses, administrators, even patients — benefit from staff working in a modern and efficient environment. Some of the greatest beneficiaries may be the schedulers. Thanks to Lumevi’s digitized scheduling process, assistant and head nurses can redirect a significant portion of their time and resources towards more meaningful value-adding tasks as opposed to clerical ones. 

Lumevi’s fully integrated scheduling solution is designed to streamline healthcare staff scheduling through process automation, optimization, budget control, resource management, and regulatory compliance. Lumevi Scheduling is the next-generation scheduling solution designed exclusively for Canadian healthcare organizations. Streamlining and automating the scheduling life cycle enables you to instantly add value back to where it matters most: patient care.