Help! I sit on a new scheduling commitee that is pondering self-scheduling. There is so much negativity in the unit that believe it won't work. I need help to prove them wrong. If anyone has self-scheduling and is willing to share their guidelines I would be most grateful. We really need this to keep our staff.
1. How many beds do you have?
2. How many nurses play into the total mix?
3. How many different shifts do you have (we have 5)
4. Does senority play a factor in who gets first dibs?
5. What constitues a weekend?
6. Do people have to rotate shifts?
7. Who gets to sign up first for the schedule.
8. What region is the hospital that you work in?
IF there is anything else, please add. The more information that I have the better chance that we have to get this off the ground instead of being stuck in meetings talking about it. If you want to PM this info that is ok too.
Specializes in NICU, PICU, PCVICU and peds oncology.
1. how many beds do you have? depends on who's counting. we have 15, we frequently fill 17 or 18 by putting 2 patients into single rooms. safety is the last consideration.
2. how many nurses play into the total mix? we have about 125 nurses on staff. our baseline number is 18 per shift, generally 1:1 with an unassigned transport nurse and a resource nurse. charge is supposed to be out-of-scope, but we usually have to fill that role out of our baseline staffing, especially on nights. we also have to have 3 ecls specialists (included in the baseline count because they aren't a dedicated team like transport) on each shift; at least a third of our ecls specialists are rts, just to make things more difficult...
3. how many different shifts do you have (we have 5) in theory we have 2, 7a-7p and 7p-7a. but one nurse has been given special treatment and works 11a-7p weekdays only. pregnant nurses near the end of their incubation period work mostly 7a-3p. and our casuals work whatever portion of the shift they want.
4. does senority play a factor in who gets first dibs? not even remotely.
5. what constitues a weekend?friday night, saturday and sunday
6. do people have to rotate shifts? they can schedule themselves for whichever shift they prefer, with the knowledge that they may be shifted to another day or another shift depending on need. it's the only way a person will ever get to work permanent days or nights... our management will not grant that privilege, even though in our last round of negotiations the employer wanted the right to arbitrarily designate certain "lines" on the schedule to permanent nights. we also have a number of people on rotations. all new staff are required to work a rotation for the first year. (right now that would include about 1/3 of our staff!!)the full time master rotation is a real mess... everybody works 5 mondays out of 6 and only 1 wednesday and thursday.
7. who gets to sign up first for the schedule. we usually schedule for either 6 or 12 weeks at a time, and it's done up to 6 months in advance. the schedule comes out with deadlines for scheduling and negotiations; it's initially a free-for-all: it's basically a blank slate and people fill in what they want to work. they are allowed to mark 4 dates per round that they absolutely do not want to or cannot work; the annual teacher's convention, spring break, easter, hallowe'en, christmas and new year's day are exempt from this. after the first stage is done, the members of the committee go over the master and draw up an over-and-under sheet for the negotiations phase. each person is expected to make changes to their original schedule to smooth out the over-under situation. once negotiations have closed, the committee once again goes over the master and makes whatever changes they must to "fix" the schedule so that our baseline requirements are met. (of course this is cr@p, because we have a lot of shifts where we are severely short of scheduled staff.) there is an element of nepotism at play with that part of the process... it's easy to pick out who has friends on the committee, because they're the ones who never have their original selections tinkered with, and the ones who get away with never working weekends, although there is a requirement to do so. that requirement may be waived based on the "numbers", and it seems that it's regularly waived for the same small select group. anyway, once the committee is happy with the master, it goes to one of our managers for approval. she tinkers with it some more based on her own agenda, and then it goes to our staffing office for final posting.
8. what region is the hospital that you work in? alberta, canada
i no longer self-schedule. i opted to go on a rotation as of last september. i grew tired of having my schedule look totally different from what i'd started with: negotiating to the best of my ability given my other responsibilities only to find i'd been removed from a statutory holiday while having to work the rest of the weekend then finding out they'd had 3 casuals in on that shift; having shifts moved so that i'd work a day, have 1 off, work 2 nights, have 1 off, work a day then have 6 off, instead of the original 2 on, 4 off that i'd started out with. i work a 0.7 fte and we're supposed to self-schedule so that our pay periods are roughly even, but i was ending up with really unbalanced cheques. and i felt like i was being picked on. so i stopped. (i work 3 wednesdays and thursdays out of 6, 2 mondays [1 day, 1 night] and 1 tuesday as well as 2 weekends.)
i've heard that no new staff hired after a certain date will ever be permitted to self-schedule and they plan to phase it out completely over the next 18 months. i'm happy about that because we're having serious problems with staff development (incompetence slipping through the cracks for example) because you never work with the same people often enough to know where they are. management doesn't work nights much, so it's possible to fly under the radar for years without any attention being brought to issues. i like knowing who i'm going to be working beside, and knowing that there's a feeling of teamwork. you won't have that with self-scheduling.
NotReady4PrimeTime, RN
5 Articles; 7,358 Posts
1. how many beds do you have? depends on who's counting. we have 15, we frequently fill 17 or 18 by putting 2 patients into single rooms. safety is the last consideration.
2. how many nurses play into the total mix? we have about 125 nurses on staff. our baseline number is 18 per shift, generally 1:1 with an unassigned transport nurse and a resource nurse. charge is supposed to be out-of-scope, but we usually have to fill that role out of our baseline staffing, especially on nights. we also have to have 3 ecls specialists (included in the baseline count because they aren't a dedicated team like transport) on each shift; at least a third of our ecls specialists are rts, just to make things more difficult...
3. how many different shifts do you have (we have 5) in theory we have 2, 7a-7p and 7p-7a. but one nurse has been given special treatment and works 11a-7p weekdays only. pregnant nurses near the end of their incubation period work mostly 7a-3p. and our casuals work whatever portion of the shift they want.
4. does senority play a factor in who gets first dibs? not even remotely.
5. what constitues a weekend?friday night, saturday and sunday
6. do people have to rotate shifts? they can schedule themselves for whichever shift they prefer, with the knowledge that they may be shifted to another day or another shift depending on need. it's the only way a person will ever get to work permanent days or nights... our management will not grant that privilege, even though in our last round of negotiations the employer wanted the right to arbitrarily designate certain "lines" on the schedule to permanent nights. we also have a number of people on rotations. all new staff are required to work a rotation for the first year. (right now that would include about 1/3 of our staff!!)the full time master rotation is a real mess... everybody works 5 mondays out of 6 and only 1 wednesday and thursday.
7. who gets to sign up first for the schedule. we usually schedule for either 6 or 12 weeks at a time, and it's done up to 6 months in advance. the schedule comes out with deadlines for scheduling and negotiations; it's initially a free-for-all: it's basically a blank slate and people fill in what they want to work. they are allowed to mark 4 dates per round that they absolutely do not want to or cannot work; the annual teacher's convention, spring break, easter, hallowe'en, christmas and new year's day are exempt from this. after the first stage is done, the members of the committee go over the master and draw up an over-and-under sheet for the negotiations phase. each person is expected to make changes to their original schedule to smooth out the over-under situation. once negotiations have closed, the committee once again goes over the master and makes whatever changes they must to "fix" the schedule so that our baseline requirements are met. (of course this is cr@p, because we have a lot of shifts where we are severely short of scheduled staff.) there is an element of nepotism at play with that part of the process... it's easy to pick out who has friends on the committee, because they're the ones who never have their original selections tinkered with, and the ones who get away with never working weekends, although there is a requirement to do so. that requirement may be waived based on the "numbers", and it seems that it's regularly waived for the same small select group. anyway, once the committee is happy with the master, it goes to one of our managers for approval. she tinkers with it some more based on her own agenda, and then it goes to our staffing office for final posting.
8. what region is the hospital that you work in? alberta, canada
i no longer self-schedule. i opted to go on a rotation as of last september. i grew tired of having my schedule look totally different from what i'd started with: negotiating to the best of my ability given my other responsibilities only to find i'd been removed from a statutory holiday while having to work the rest of the weekend then finding out they'd had 3 casuals in on that shift; having shifts moved so that i'd work a day, have 1 off, work 2 nights, have 1 off, work a day then have 6 off, instead of the original 2 on, 4 off that i'd started out with. i work a 0.7 fte and we're supposed to self-schedule so that our pay periods are roughly even, but i was ending up with really unbalanced cheques. and i felt like i was being picked on. so i stopped. (i work 3 wednesdays and thursdays out of 6, 2 mondays [1 day, 1 night] and 1 tuesday as well as 2 weekends.)
i've heard that no new staff hired after a certain date will ever be permitted to self-schedule and they plan to phase it out completely over the next 18 months. i'm happy about that because we're having serious problems with staff development (incompetence slipping through the cracks for example) because you never work with the same people often enough to know where they are. management doesn't work nights much, so it's possible to fly under the radar for years without any attention being brought to issues. i like knowing who i'm going to be working beside, and knowing that there's a feeling of teamwork. you won't have that with self-scheduling.