Holiday Scheduling

KelRN215, BSN, RN · Jan 1, 2012

Why would you have to work a day touching the holiday? The people who are working the holidays should be nice and work the days surrounding it so that others can travel for the holidays and they should expect to be able to do the same for their holidays off. I worked Christmas Day and the 26th this year and I have worked Thanksgiving and Black Friday every year for the past 4 years.

We don't have a set "every other holiday" schedule or anything like that. Every year, we rank our choices from 1-6 for what we want to work and then the holiday schedule is made based on that. They claim that everyone is to work 1 major and 1 minor holiday but it never happens that way. Not to mention, we have enough staff that we don't need everyone to work 2 holidays and our census always drops around the holidays.

Every other holiday system may be more objective and in some ways, more fair, but I actually like the way it is done on my floor. I hate Thanksgiving so I sign up to work it every year. I can't tolerate spending more than one of the Thanksgiving/Christmas Eve/Christmas Day holidays with my family, so I always work 2/3. I have never once worked New Years.

Ruby Vee, BSN · Jan 1, 2012

we do self scheduling as well -- there are 7 paid holidays a year and we work every other. if you work the holiday, you're required to work the day before and/or after. so for thanksgiving, i worked wednesday, thursday, saturday and sunday. for ny i'm working friday, saturday and sunday while dh is working saturday, sunday and monday. theorectically, i should have had 4 days off for christmas so i could visit out of town family. i got the 24th and 25th. usually, it works out better than that.

i think it's a fair way to do the holiday scheduling and it usually allows those who have the holiday off to travel to see family. for those of us working the holiday, we usually celebrate the week before or the week after. we had our turkey day november 20, and by thursday i didn't want to look at another turkey!

Meriwhen, ASN, BSN, MSN, RN · Jan 1, 2012

My last facility divided all the staff in half and assigned each group the holidays that we'd have to work, and every year we'd switch holidays. We were not mandated to work the day before/after the holiday.

If we were scheduled to work a holiday and wanted it off, we could not use PTO: it was up to us to find a replacement to work it for us or cut a deal with staffing. If we volunteered to work a holiday we weren't scheduled for, that wasn't enough to get us off the hook for the holiday that we were scheduled for--if we wanted that day off we'd still have to find a replacement or talk to staffing.

Even with that, holidays were still notoriously difficult to staff and there was lots of staff grumbling.