How Nurse Scheduling Can Make or Break a Resilient Team

In current healthcare industry conditions, there’s not much room for error. Nursing and personnel shortages are at an all-time high. Burnout rates are decimating staff numbers that remain. Your nursing team, hospital, or clinic may already be experiencing intense overwork patterns, shortages, or staffing difficulties.

Scheduling can play a significant and potent part for healthcare teams. If done well, it can help alleviate or avoid huge problems down the line. If done poorly, scheduling can hamper effective and skilled nursing teams and sometimes cause members of those teams to walk away from healthcare altogether. It is imperative that you prioritize savvy scheduling techniques to keep your team strong, healthy, and working at its best.

How Scheduling Can Impact Nurses’ Physical and Mental Health

Maintaining health and wellbeing is vital for every nurse. Nursing is a highly demanding profession and can strain both the body and mind. Without proper attention paid to both physical and mental health, a number of negative consequences can occur. Nurses can experience severe or lasting personal deterioration, and their on-the-job performance can also suffer. Improper scheduling can threaten both physical and mental wellbeing for nurses. This can happen in a few ways:

Long Shift Lengths

Exhaustion and depleted stamina take both a physical and mental toll on individuals. The human body needs sleep, food, and rest proportionate to exertion and energy output to recover and continue performing at its best.

Long shifts, especially on busy wards or in understaffed locations, often prevent necessary replenishment and can result in nurses operating on very little steam and energy by the end of the shift. Worse, if this becomes a repeated pattern, this deficit can build on itself over time.

Overworking During a Shift

As alluded to above, the volume of work required in a shift matters just as much as the total time length of the shift. Not every nursing shift is created equal. The more that shifts require covering distance between locations or wards, lifting weight to provide patient care or transport supplies, or having intense emotional interactions with patients or medical colleagues, the faster that nurse is depleted and the more risk they incur of becoming worn out or overworked.

Mandatory Overtime

Because of personnel shortages, many nurses are required in their contracts to work a certain number of overtime hours. This is the result of hospitals being required to maintain minimum nursing number levels but not having sufficient manpower to do this without overworking their staff. Because of this difficult reality, mandatory overtime clauses exacerbate difficult working conditions and contribute to physical and mental strain on nurses.

Moving Towards Better Scheduling Protocol

If not assessed and corrected, poor scheduling techniques can risk nurses’ health and performance. They may ultimately lead to mistakes, lawsuits, low morale, burnout, nurses quitting, or all of the above. For this reason, it is imperative to institute strong scheduling strategies before letting bad ones cause significant problems. There is no time like the present to assess your scheduling process. These tips can provide a place to start:

Put a Cap on Consecutive Shifts

Working too many consecutive shifts in a row or within a period of time (like a week) has been found to be one of the biggest causes of negative impacts on nurses’ health. To mitigate this problem, define specific caps for assigning consecutive shifts within given periods (for instance, no consecutive 12-hour shifts and a maximum of only two consecutive 8-hour shifts, allowing at least 16 hours of rest afterward before assigning the next shift).

Though these may require more strategy and shuffling to manage, putting rules like this in place will do wonders to help your staff avoid dangerous levels of exhaustion or burnout.

Pay Close Attention to Shift Flipping

When nurses work a day shift followed closely by working a night shift (or vice versa), they are much more susceptible to fatigue and exhaustion, especially during that second shift. Our bodies can only rebound so quickly from changes in rhythm.

This should be avoided as much as possible. Nurses should be allowed adequate time in between shifts to rest and recover before flipping to the opposite side of the day. This can protect both them and those they are caring for from the mistakes made more possible by tiredness and lack of proper recovery.

Ask Your Nurses What They Need

Sometimes one of the most effective ways of coming up with better scheduling strategies and processes can simply be asking your nursing team what they need and think. They can voice what elements of the current scheduling process are most difficult or causing the most fatigue. They can also help come up with solutions to tricky conundrums.

By making scheduling a two-way conversation, you can not only help them better understand what pressures are exerted by things like regulatory requirements, but they can help you better understand how scheduling affects their quality of work and wellbeing.

In addition to coming up with more creative and effective solutions, speaking with your nurses directly can create another important benefit. Team morale is incredibly important for nursing staff. Getting your nurses’ input about scheduling can provide a strong morale boost amongst the team because it indicates care for their wellbeing and respect for their wishes and opinions. Listen to their insights and requests. Apply and honor them as much as you can. You might be surprised by the amount of positive response you receive back.

Use a Scheduling Tool or Software to Avoid Mistakes, Automate Processes, and Manage Shift Trades

A number of helpful softwares are available today to manage nurse shift scheduling. Some are even free, and even paid solutions are often well worth the expense. Shift management tools can automate the trickier parts of the job. They can also often streamline or mitigate what can otherwise be lots of administrative back and forth for both you and the rest of the team.

Finally, they can manage the rules or guidelines your team needs in place and make sure they’re being followed.

Nurse scheduling can be a significant factor when it comes to maintaining (or eroding) the health, longevity, and performance of any nursing team. Make sure your team has taken the time to institute effective scheduling practices.