Electronic Health Reporter

Managing your healthcare personnel’s shifts is no easy feat. It can be a colossal nightmare, particularly if you’re handling hundreds of staff across multiple healthcare facilities.

If you don’t manage personnel shifts properly, chaos can ensue and negatively impact your staff’s morale, service delivery, and your entire operations.

So the big question becomes, how do you ensure you manage personnel scheduling efficiently and effectively and turn your healthcare challenges into opportunities?

That’s what we’ll help you find out in this guide.

1. Simplify your staff scheduling

A key aspect of managing your healthcare personnel shift scheduling is to keep it as simple as possible.

The more complex your staff scheduling process is, the more time-consuming, inefficient, and likely it is to be filled with errors. This can easily lead to scheduling issues and inefficient workflows that prevent you from delivering quality services.

Use a healthcare scheduling software that simplifies the process for you.

One such solution is Deputy. The software’s simple scheduling app lets you create your staff schedule with a few clicks. As a result, you can do away with using an often chaotic and confusing spreadsheet or other tool that requires manual scheduling.

This saves you and your managers boatloads of time while ensuring you maintain ideal staffing in all your facilities. On the Deputy scheduling interface, click a specific date to add a shift. Then, configure the details by assigning staff, choosing a department, adding break times, and other information.

Once you’re done, save the schedule and create other personnel shifts accordingly. If a staff calls in sick, fill in the shift with a qualified replacement efficiently by letting employees use the app to swap schedules with your other eligible personnel.

This saves you from time-consuming phone calls to find replacements, eliminating this often tedious back and forth process. With reliable scheduling software, you’ll have an entire daily, weekly, or monthly schedule up and ready in minutes and with a few clicks. This eliminates the manual and laborious aspects of the process.

2. Automate repetitive scheduling tasks

Scheduling healthcare personnel shifts the traditional way involves many manual, time-consuming tasks. This includes creating individual schedules manually, collating timesheets, performing calculations for payroll processing, and other work.

Save valuable time and energy by automating your critical healthcare personnel scheduling process. For instance, some healthcare scheduling software offers auto-scheduling features that streamline setting and assigning shifts.

You can set your priorities, such as the equal spread of hours, lowest cost, and specific preferences. The auto-scheduling software sets up your healthcare personnel schedule with team members matching your needs.

Other healthcare scheduling software also lets you auto-build your schedule templates based on your predicted number of required staff on hand at any time. This helps you handle foot traffic, forecasted sales, and other demand trends more effectively.

Automating your scheduling streamlines critical aspects of staff scheduling, helping you manage your healthcare personnel shifts more efficiently. It also helps ensure you schedule the right people at the right time and keep your wage costs within your budget. What’s more, you won’t lose too much of your time and resources in the scheduling process alone.

3. Track personnel work hours

It’s easier to assign shifts when you know your staff schedules and the number of hours they’ve worked in a day, week, or month. Simplify and streamline recording and tracking work hours for your managers and teams by getting rid of paper timesheets and manual processes.

Leverage time tracking software that allows your personnel to clock in and out through a digital, easy-to-use, and accurate timesheet. With an online or cloud-based time tracking software, your healthcare personnel can easily log in and out and show they are where they’re supposed to be. Some platforms even provide facial recognition and GPS features.

Opt for a time tracking software that improves managing your healthcare personnel shifts by giving your staff convenient scheduling options and more control over their schedules. For instance, use a scheduling and timesheet app with a mobile version for quick and easy access on the go.

This makes it easy for your healthcare personnel to check the latest schedule, submit time-off requests, and claim available shifts. Swapping shifts will also be seamless and pain-free, saving everyone tons of time and effort. Time tracking apps can also streamline your payroll process since managers can efficiently view, access, and approve timesheets individually or in bulk and export them to your payroll software in a few clicks.

4. Centralize your information

It’s vital to establish an organized and centralized communication system to ensure seamless, effective scheduling and related information sharing with your healthcare staff. Avoid getting your lines crossed by using a scheduling platform that allows you to send personnel schedules directly to your team through desktop or mobile from one place.

Doing so helps ensure you share information effectively and that your staff receives critical schedule changes and updates promptly. This can help you handle last-minute schedule changes efficiently and keep everyone in the loop.

Choose a healthcare scheduling software that lets you share essential records within the platform or via email and messaging integrations to streamline your information sharing and communication.

You can also use this feature to make your communications more personal. For instance, you could record announcements, new scheduling process demos, and even new staff introduction videos and send them to all your staff right from the platform.

Establish a centralized and efficient communication process to improve your team collaboration, keep everyone up-to-date at all times, and manage your healthcare personnel’s shifts better.

Wrapping up the best methods to manage healthcare personal shifts

A job in healthcare is one of the most stressful jobs in the world for both employees and managers. Eliminate the additional stress of chaotic and inefficient healthcare personnel scheduling by simplifying and automating key aspects of the process.

Seamless scheduling eliminates manual, tedious admin work for managers and staff, and it can give your personnel more control over their schedules. This can lead to efficient workflows, better employee morale, and improved service delivery. Start by following the tips in this guide and assess which methods work best to help you achieve an efficient personnel shift management process.