What do other hospitals do regard to scheduling staff for weekends?

Nurses General Nursing

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Hello,

At the floor I work at, a lot of people are unwilling to work weekends, me included. I normally work beginning of the weeks and had agreed to work up to half of the Sundays as needed. But due to many who absolutely do not want to work Sundays, I recently ended up working most of the Sundays, and the new schedule shows me being scheduled to work every Sunday. I feel very stuck. The assistant manager and the new scheduler both know I am reluctant to work weekends but don't mind doing it once in a while as my contribution as a staff member. I've already sacrificed a lot having to forfeit many Saturday night activities and now feel like I'm being taken advantage of. I've had other people work in other facilities telling me such scheduling is not fair and that weekends should be rotated. Is that the case in most facilities or am I complaining too much?

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Specializes in OR, Nursing Professional Development.

What do the staffing policies state? That is where you need to be looking for information.

In my facility, we have a variety of weekend policies, depending on the department. The floors that are running 24/7 (basically, non-procedural areas) work every other weekend. There is no such thing as not wanting to work weekends- you either do your share or find someone willing to cover you. I work in a procedural area (OR) on a specialty team (cardiac). The rest of the OR works every third weekend. I cover a weekend of call once a month.

Expectations to have to give up part of every weekend is asinine. There needs to be set policies that are followed by everyone. Otherwise, the place is just going to end up losing all its staff to facilities that have decent staffing patterns. It's not fair to not have everyone pulling their weight when it comes to weekends.

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Specializes in Acute Care, Rehab, Palliative.

Where I work we have a preset 6 week rotating schedule. Our union contract outlines how many weekends we have to work. ( one out of every three). Nobody gets every weekend off.

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Every third weekend. And two Friday's and two Monday's during the 6 week schedule.

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cool thanks I'll check on policies.

Actually there are people (like a nurse or 2 on days and a nurse or 2 on nights) want to work weekends and do work every weekend, because of the weekend differential pay. But yeah most of us don't care for it. There are more to life than extra pays (unless they want to pay us double time haha).

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I agree with the others. I've never heard of anywhere that operates 24/7 that doesn't require everyone to work their share of weekends. My union contract specifies that RNs work every third weekend minimally. If we need a scheduled weekend off then we need to find our own coverage and have it approved by management or we have to suck it up and work.

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Looks like most other places require people to work something like every 3rd weekend. By weekend, does it include both Saturday and Sunday? Or just one of these 2?

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Specializes in Critical Care.
Looks like most other places require people to work something like every 3rd weekend. By weekend, does it include both Saturday and Sunday? Or just one of these 2?

"Weekend" is both saturday and sunday, to have people only work one weekend day would mean they would have to work every weekend or every 2 out of 3 weekends at least, which is why most people prefer to work their weekend days in the same weekend, which then at least gives you full weekends off.

I've never worked anywhere that working weekends is even an option, it's always a mandatory every other or every third, for staffing purposes saturday and sunday aren't any different than any other day of the week, you can't just shut down on weekends.

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My contract that I signed when I hired stated the weekend policy. I think it was every third, but since I was in school mine was modified to make it every weekend. That's what I wanted and there were others who prefer them off so it worked great.

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As a staff nurse in a 24/7 department I have always seen an every other weekend requirement. For PRN workers there is usually less of a weekend requirement, but I'm seeing less and less zero weekend employment opportunities.

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Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
Looks like most other places require people to work something like every 3rd weekend. By weekend, does it include both Saturday and Sunday? Or just one of these 2?

"Weekend" is how your facility defines it. It can be Friday and Saturday, Saturday and Sunday or Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It can even include Monday. Your facility may say you have to work 12 weekend shifts every six weeks, or it may say you have to work three weekends (Saturday & Sunday) every six weeks, or it may say you have to work every other Friday & Saturday or Saturday & Sunday. But most places that are open 24/7 have some sort of weekend requirement guidelines. You may still find some nurses flying under the radar and not working any, but there are guidelines written down somewhere.

When I worked in one CCU, our union contract specified that if we were scheduled for an extra weekend shift, we got triple pay. That's something to look into as well.

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so sounds like my schedule is not as horrible as it seems, working sundays only out of 2 days of weekends...

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