Nurse Schedulers: Save Time Scheduling and Keep Your Nurses Happy

Are your nurses burned out? A study by Nursing CE Central found that 95% of their nurse participants said yes. Almost half who reported feeling burned out said they were actively looking for a less stressful nursing position, considering leaving the nursing profession altogether, or have already done so within the last three years due to burnout.

Burnout has serious consequences beyond employee morale. Poor safety compliance and lower quality of care are some of the more damaging effects of burnout. It also leads to lower organizational commitment from nurses and decreased productivity. This makes burnout not just an individual’s problem but also a patient care and administrative issue.

Unfortunately, the inherent unpredictability of healthcare and nursing specifically is one of the biggest challenges for nurse schedulers. From one day to the next, there are varying patient needs and unexpected changes, leading to unplanned overtime and making long shifts even longer. Add to that rotating shifts between day and night and consecutive shifts, and you end up with nurses treating patients on very little sleep.

Save Time and Manage Compliance with Automation

Nursing schedules, particularly the round-the-clock schedules of hospitals and long-term care centers, are some of the most complicated employee schedules out there. Add to that the manual or antiquated processes many healthcare centers are still using today, and it’s a recipe for disaster. An automated scheduling system makes filling gaps due to nurses calling out and changing patient needs much more manageable. The nurse scheduler can easily ensure that nurses filling those gaps have had the much-needed time to rest and recover.

However, building the best nurse schedules also requires time and attendance data that can apply compliance requirements, organizational rules and exceptions. TCP’s TimeClock Plus software helps you monitor overtime and put controls in place to help limit overtime while complying with nurse scheduling regulations.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you’re at the end of a pay period calculating overtime hours and suddenly realize those hours are out of control? It’s a common scenario when nurse schedulers try to manage the complexity manually or use the wrong automation tools.

Complex Scheduling Made Easy with TCP’s Humanity Scheduling

What if your organization has multiple locations, 24/7 care, and traveling nurses? Without a central, enterprise-wide solution, managers must cross-check several data sources to schedule each employee properly, creating opportunities for errors and a whole bunch of frustrated employees who can’t really be sure when they’re supposed to be working. On top of that, your schedulers are stressed out over potential mistakes that may not become apparent until they’re too late to fix.

Humanity Scheduling provides even smarter scheduling for these incredibly complex situations.

• Multiple-location scheduling: Managers and supervisors can keep track of employee schedules, time and attendance records, and clock-in/clock-out across multiple locations quickly and easily.
• Flexibility: Assign custom roles based on skills and certifications to ensure the right staff is always in the right place. You can also ensure schedules are built according to your business needs or specific rules, using Humanity Scheduling’s rule-based conflict management modules.
• Fluctuating demand: With Humanity’s Demand-Driven Scheduling capability, allows healthcare centers to use historical demand data to build more accurate schedules for each shift.
• Mobility: Employees can request time off, pick up open shifts, release shifts, and adjust their availability directly from the Humanity mobile app.
• Integration: Humanity integrates with the most powerful Human Capital Management platforms.

TCP Software’s solutions provide nurse schedulers the tools to run reports and have real-time access to critical data preventing a situation where poor balance to the schedule could lead to overtime that’s out of control and employees who are too burned out to be effective on the job. They also help healthcare centers create accurate, conflict-free, and demand-based schedules and offer more reasonable hours for your medical staff.

We know that well-rested nurses are apt to make fewer mistakes, are more empathetic and have more energy to provide exceptional patient care. Our optimized scheduling tools are flexible enough to accommodate a healthcare center’s requirements to help manage burnout, improve morale and keep good nurses in the profession they love.