Practical tips for efficient duty scheduling
For years, the nursing sector has been complaining about a shortage of skilled workers. Added to this is the extra workload caused by the pandemic. A duty schedule without overtime seems almost utopian. This is also confirmed by figures: German nursing staff work around 14.8 million additional hours a year – only a third of which are paid. And the trend is rising. Here are five tips on how to prevent overtime in nursing.
Plan ahead
In other sectors, long-term duty planning is standard. In nursing, however, this does not always seem to be the case. According to a study by the Research Centre for Family Conscious Personnel Policy and Curacon, only 33 percent of care workers can count on a duty roster published in good time. The schedule is only fully reliable for just under one fifth.
Especially in nursing with changing shifts, it is important for the staff to have a reliable and early duty schedule. This is the only way to build private life around duty. Thus, staff satisfaction stands and falls with the duty roster. The rosters should therefore be handed out at least four weeks before their effective date. Even better are additional annual duty rosters. These are flexibly adapted to the acute need in the respective month. Annual duty rosters help management to recognise bottlenecks in good time.
Recognising bottlenecks
A colleague is absent due to illness and four other employees go on holiday. Planned time off coupled with uncontrollable staff absences can quickly lead to bottlenecks in nursing. This leads to an overload of the remaining workers – a reason for dismissal for about 13 percent of the nursing staff.
In order to avoid temporary understaffing as much as possible, employers should take into account risk factors for bottlenecks such as holidays of different religions. Further training of staff can be included in the planning already at the beginning of the year. It also helps to make nursing staff aware of the need to submit their holiday requests as early as December or January. Long-term and strategic planning is essential to prevent bottlenecks.
To prevent holiday peaks, for example, a simple calculation helps: multiply the number of current employees by their annual holiday entitlement and add the remaining holiday of the staff. The whole thing then has to be divided by the twelve months of the year and a rate of around 20 per cent – as a kind of additional safety net – added. This helps to determine how many days of leave employers should plan for each month. For example:
A senior citizens‘ facility currently has 40 employees, each of whom is allowed to use 30 days of leave per year. In addition, the staff is entitled to 28 days of remaining leave.
40 employees x 30 days of leave + 28 days of remaining leave = 1228 days of leave
1228 leave days: 12 months per year = 102.3 leave days
102.3 leave days + 20 per cent = 123 leave days
This simple calculation shows at the beginning of the year that the senior citizens‘ facility may plan a maximum of 123 days of holiday per month to prevent holiday-related bottlenecks.
Hire sufficient staff
Basically, it can be said: all the organising around the duty roster and the monthly leave days is of no use if there is a general lack of staff. Only with sufficient staff can duty rosters pass the reality check. A prerequisite for a functioning daily routine and satisfied care workers is to close staffing gaps. Therefore, it is important for employers never to schedule the full working hours of existing caregivers. Around 80 per cent of each employee should always be expected in order to be prepared for short-term staff shortages. In addition, nurses who will be absent in the long term should be replaced by new skilled workers.
Working Hours Act (ArbZG) as a guide
Especially in shift work, it can easily happen that the legal requirements for working hours – laid down in the Working Hours Act (ArbZG) – are involuntarily exceeded by staff. Employers should therefore always keep a close eye on the working hours of their staff in order to prevent overloading. The law states that the maximum daily working time should not exceed eight hours. In addition, due to the high physical and mental stress, care workers are required to take rest breaks – at least 30 minutes a day. Workers should take their first rest break after the sixth hour of work at the latest.
According to § 5 of the Working Hours Act (ArbZG), an eight-hour shift must be followed by an uninterrupted break of at least eleven hours. It is not legal to take another shift immediately after a shift. For example, if a nurse finishes her shift at 7 p.m. and is supposed to start the next shift at 5 a.m. the next day, this is a violation of the minimum rest period. On-call duty is an exception: Six hours of rest are sufficient until the next shift starts, as long as they can be compensated for later.
Shift patterns should be designed with care
Constantly switching back and forth between early and late shifts is not sustainable for nurses in the long run. This has both physical and psychological consequences. A good, gently designed shift rhythm is therefore essential for the maximum stress capacity of the employees. Forward rotating shifts are particularly useful. This means that shifts are worked in the order of early shift – late shift – night shift. This way, the organism can get used to the time changes better and nurses do not suffer from the shifts. But beware: the body never gets used to night duty. Therefore, more than three consecutive night shifts are not recommended under any circumstances.
