Managing Healthcare Staff Schedules in Unparalleled Times

Senior living facilities have been affected by COVID-19 in unprecedented ways, placing healthcare workers under extraordinary stress. Employees must work long hours while putting themselves and their families at risk of infection. Staff members put extra time into ensuring patient rooms and common areas are cleaned and disinfected. Nurses face the emotionally and physically exhausting challenge of treating infected patients while taking precautions to keep uninfected residents safe. Nurse managers must maintain appropriate staffing levels, which is critical to the well-being of their nurses, safety of the residents, and the quality of patient care. However, ensuring proper shift coverage is more challenging than ever as absenteeism rises due to illness. To address that challenge and others, many healthcare administrators have turned to healthcare staffing software. In addition to streamlining the scheduling process, software such as ScheduleAnywhere offers many tools to address fluctuating staffing requirements. Managers can communicate with staff to fill open shifts and quickly meet demands for additional support. Some employee scheduling software can also deliver notifications through multiple communication channels, such as text messages and emails, to ensure everyone receives information quickly. It’s important that healthcare facilities have the right people in place where and when they are needed. Some healthcare staffing software track nurse attributes, such as skills, certifications and training. This helps facilities maintain compliance, an avoid missing a license or certification expiration or renewal. Managers can also quickly identify a select group of staff members with the qualifications to address each situation. Staff scheduling software also frees managers from performing manual staffing calculations, giving them more time to focus on day-to-day operations. That advantage is more important now than ever as resources are already strained. This feature enables managers to easily determine whether scheduled staffing levels are too low or high and adjust them to meet fluctuating personnel requirements. Scheduling challenges related to COVID-19 create an additional level of stress for nurse managers. Learn how ScheduleAnywhere healthcare staffing software provides the assurance that every nurse has real-time schedule information and every shift is properly staffed.

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