Delivering the most effective care in long-term care, senior living, hospice, and rehab facilities depends on having the proper staff in place. Having too many nurses than needed increases labor costs and having too few nurse adversely affects quality of care. And if your quality of care suffers, your facility’s reputation suffers.
Many long-term care, senior living, hospice, and rehab facilities still manage their staff, nurses, custodial, and non-skilled workers who deliver support services manually with calendar boards or spreadsheets. This often resulted in scheduling conflicts and endless back-and-forth about who can work when, where, what duties and tasks to be performed. To properly care for patients and to maintain the required nurse staffing plans and ratios, each shift must be covered by the right number of nurses with the right combination of skills. Staffing must take into account availability of qualified personnel; nurses’ preferences for particular days, shifts, units; and regulatory and union requirements. Regulatory and union requirements govern the number of hours worked, overtime, time off between shifts, staffing ratios, certifications and credentials.
Fortunately, there is a variety of staff scheduling software solutions available to help with staff scheduling needs. While some of the very best software packages are not free, their developers let you try before you buy so you can determine if the software is a good fit for your operations. In other cases, the free application may limit the number of employees that you can schedule or display ads while running.
Scheduling Software for Long-Term Care, Senior Living, Hospice, and Rehab Facilities
Here is a list of three staff scheduling software applications with a brief description of each:
Notes: Not all are downloadable desktop programs for Windows/Mac OS and some may be browser-based applications that require high-speed Internet access. Be sure to read all systems and licensing agreements from the developer’s website to make sure you meet all requirements. At the time of publication, a free basic service (lite or cripple version) or a free trial version of all of these software packages is available from their manufacturer’s website. To take full advantage of a package’s features you may need to upgrade to a paid version of the software.
What Can Scheduling Software Do for You?
Long term care staff scheduling software takes the hard work out of staffing, scheduling, and publishing work schedules, freeing you up to do more important things. It helps drive efficiencies and frees up staff to spend more time providing quality resident
care.
- Spend less time creating and publishing work schedules. Scheduling software makes scheduling nurses and support staff, editing information, analyzing data, and distributing employee work schedules easy and simple. Schedule any number of nurses, assign shifts, stations, floors, wards, breaks, and duties within each shift.
- Quickly fill a shift or find a substitute based on many criteria including job position, skills, availability, labor cost, work hour limits, and seniority.
- Prevent and alerts you to availability conflicts, duplicate shift assignments, overlapped shift assignments, and conflicts with scheduled time off.
- Know instantly where nurses are assigned. No need to flip through pages of paper to see absentee, on-call, training, or overtime situations.
- Reduce the time to track and assign employee training, vacation and time off requests. Nurse scheduling software keeps you up to date on who will not be coming in to work and why. Its comprehensive reports provide details on planned vacation, training, and time off hours for any time period you select.
- Reduce labor costs and avoid unnecessary overtime. Long-term care scheduling software lets you accurately track absences and forecast staffing needs to minimize over-staffing, which in turn reduces payroll costs. It automatically sums up employees’ work hours and costs; calculates overtime, on-call, time off, and incentive pays; and provides detailed cost reports so you know instantly if you are on budget.
- Keep scheduling and employee information in one place for easy access. Insert ID photos as well as employee contact information, authorized work stations, skills, available work hours for part-time and volunteers, and work hour constraints into employee records.
- Monitor attendance, work hours, and labor costs. Advanced nurse scheduling software with time clock features lets you see exactly who clocked in and how your scheduled hours compare to the hours your employees are actually working.