You are the nurse manager on a large unit that has 14 FTE RNs on staff, 25 FTE L

Question

You are the nurse manager on a large unit that has 14 FTE RNs on staff, 25 FTE LPNs, and 15 FTE nursing aides, orderlies, and clerks. The schedule for the next 2 months is due in administration by next week, and you are beginning to work on it. Various requests have been submitted by personnel for vacations, educational conferences, time to attend a wedding, and long weekends, and a request from one nurse asks not to be rotated to weekend evenings or nights because her husband bowls on weekends, and she has no babysitter for their three young children. Then answer the following questions:

What types of additional information do you need to complete this schedule?

How do you honor requests as submitted? What if two of the requests for vacations came from RNs scheduled to work the same weekends, and they both asked for exactly the same days off?

How do you inform staff whether their requests have been honored? Are they informed by seeing the posted schedule?

Are requests taken in the order in which they are received? Or do you have another means of honoring requests?

Explanation / Answer

1) -Ensure that the nursing staff within their clinical area are deployed efficiently and effectively to meet the demands of the patients within that area.

- Leave details of the current staff

- Previous duty roaster (for reference)

- The skill mix of staff.

-Fluctuations in patient population

Honoring Requests and informing the staff

Nurse Manager has the full authority of granting leave requests according to institutional policy. The request can be considered according to the time of submission. If two requests at the same time, can be consider depending on the priority of need or reason for the leave. For example the reason of vacation or entertainment, annual leave can be hold on rather than emergency leave. If two request of same reason, then according to the time of submission of the request nurse manager can grant leave. Requests can be taken in the order in which they received. Equitable principles need to be applied to the granting of roster requests and the distribution of all shifts between full time and part time staff across the week. Remember that responding to everyone’s requests is unlikely to produce a ‘workable’ roster.

-Effective and active communication between nurses and other personnel is a good way to communicate the roaster patterns. All nurses, midwives and assistants in nursing should be actively involved in the assessment of roster patterns including reviews of equity. Periodical staff meetings is more helpful in creating the interpersonal relationships with each staff and about the persons for whom they provide care.

- Staff participation and collaboration in selecting the appropriate rostering method - If staff participate in the decision making process, they will have a better understanding of service requirements and be more likely to support the chosen rostering method.

- By providing education sessions for staff regarding the rostering method and discussing concerns.

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