Staffing: What's your method?

We all take turns doing staffing for the next shift, which sometimes gets complicated even on our small (38-bed) med/surg floor. I think most of us try hard to be fair and to consider continuity of care when making out assignments; we also avoid assigning LPNs to patients with central lines and multiple drips, and there's always this one ditzy on-call nurse who we know cannot handle a normal patient load, let alone admissions, so we have to cut her some slack.

Whenever I do staffing, I try to arrange things so the nurse who had a particular team the night before gets their same group. It's usually good for both nurse and patient, although a particularly demanding or heavy team can push a nurse to the limits of their endurance by the third night in a row, and switching them to a different group makes for good will when it's their turn to do MY assignment.