Flexible working hours

My staff nurse wants to reduce her hours from 37.5 to 24.

She has came up with set hrs and set days she would like to do.

Serive we work in is unplanned patient activities and flexibility is priority.

A full time person is needed to meet the quality care. Jobs share is not apropriate in for this service.

Human resource agrees with my decision.

I need strong and logical argument if i am going to reject her request.

Any ideas or suggestion?

Thankyou.

It sounds like you are in quite a difficult position and whilst you want to provide family friendly hours and keep your staff happy you do still have a service to provide. I agree that appointing someone on 13.5 hours may not meet those needs (am I right in thinking you work in a very specialised area rather than on a general ward)

What you have said above sounds like a logical argument you need to pad it out a bit with rationale as to why you need a full time member of staff or 2 equal job share. Working as a specialist nurse there are the training issues - this is prolonged if you are training a nurse up on part time hours as they are not there frequently enough to learn the job quickly, this will detract from patient care for longer.

It would be difficult to fill the hours with only 13.5 and get them trained quickly to meet your service needs.

I have a nurse practitioner within my team on 20 hours and to be honest it is taking ages to get them to the stage of independant advanced practice, they also do not get the continuity that the full timers get which means the patient also do not get the continuity that other patients get within specialities with full time NP's attached and although I appreciate this is less of a problem on the wards when running nurse led clinics and recalling patient the reduced hours means that patients may have a prolonged wait to see thier nurse practitioner. Whilst I try to be accomodating when it comes to flexible working as a manager you do still have to ensure the service we provide for our patients is there.

Is there any option for compromise, maybe write down alternatives that suit your service needs as well as her family needs, maybe if there is a middle ground to meet on then your member of staff can have her needs met whilst you maintain a quality service.

It is very difficult to be a nurse manager, firstly you are a nurse and you want to keep your collegues happy, you also have pressures to make sure that you provide a quality service for your patients. THis is a fine balancing act and sometimes it is really difficult to please everyone but ultimately the patient needs have to be met

I hope this helps Paris

I would tell her that if she were to bring in a qualified worker to job share with, to make up for the lost hours, then I would accommodate her request. If she can not provide someone to work in her place, then you can't accommodate her. I've worked at a place that due to a change in the labor laws, totally rearranged their work schedules. Many people with transportation and babysitting problems were put into a lurch. The employer coupled this new schedule with an overhaul of their employee structure and got rid of both those who could/would not change schedules and others deemed less desirable. Nobody in management shed any tears for the employees who left. If your employee needs to cut her hours, then she is certainly entitled to do so. Likewise, the employer is entitled to find an employee who can work the stated schedule. Give her a chance to find a solution for the problem by bringing in another employee, otherwise you have to accomplish the mission of your organization.

thats what good management should be- give and take on both parts, it would be a shame for her to leave if your area requires special skills after all you will have to invest time in a new staff member, by training them etc, which will be a strain

plus i did think it was government policy to provide a person friendly work enviornment, however i may have this wrong.........

I think that that is policy unless you can prove that it will be detremental to your business in our case patient care. I have read our work life balance policy quite carefully and although you can request flexible working your employer does not have to oblige if they can demonstrate it is not in their best interest.

My hubbie works in a comercial industry - nothing to do with healthcare and he laughs at the flexibility we have in the NHS, he thinks that we are very protected as employees within the NHS.

I don't appreciate your comment "are you in the slave trade", yes in the uk we do have family friendly policy, but the area we work in is highly specialized, we work in all area of hospital, this to include nurse led clinics (ultrasound, laser, per-post ops), our work also takes on the ward and theatres. To have someone in this post you are required to be RGN, with a post basic course in our speciality and furhter training to be specialize in area of our practice. It would take at least a year to train someone in this very specilized area and to have someone for 13hrs or so a week would just not work.

I seemed to remember from your previous posts that you were very specialised, and I would tend to agree that with it taking 12 months to train up at full time it is not efficient or an effective use of resources to employ someone at 13hours each week, I would also suggest that even at half time you are looking at 2 years before you have a fully trained nurse so even this may not be a feasible option unless you know of nurses who already have the skills you require. Unfortunaltey in todays current climate if you do not appoint into the hours you will loose them which will be detremental to the service you are trying to provide. Your original post asked for suggestions of how to phrase the refusal, the arguments you have already presented sound fairly convincing, run them by your HR department first they can tweek the wording for you.

Is there any way that there could be a comprimise with this nurse, condensed hours, annualised hours all part of family friendly working and options that I have used successfully in my team - I am in a similar position as it takes 6 - 12 months to train staff within my department all of who have young families and need flexibility. I think working in a smaller and specialised team can be harder to manage absence and needs for flexibility as there are less staff to pick up the workload.

PM me if there is anything else you think I can help with