Nurse scheduling

Nursing rosters have more people, more shifts and tighter rest rules than most physician schedules, and the fairness question is just as sharp: who gets nights, who gets weekends, and whether the person who always covers short notice is recognised for it.

Unit-based rostering

Units are a first-class concept, not a label. A site has units, each unit has its own shift templates and staffing requirements, and a nurse's eligibility is set against both.

That matters when staff float. Someone competent on two units should be schedulable on both and counted once — and their rest interval is computed across every assignment they hold, not per unit.

Skill mix

A shift that needs a charge nurse needs a charge nurse. Because the categories are defined by the site rather than fixed by the software, a unit can express whatever mix it actually requires — charge, experienced, new graduate, specialty-certified — and set eligibility and requirements against those.

Nothing in the product has an opinion about what nursing roles exist, which is deliberate: every attempt to ship that list is wrong somewhere.

Self-scheduling that stays legal

Self-scheduling is popular because it gives people control, and difficult because the aggregate of everyone's preferences is usually an illegal and badly distributed schedule.

Request periods handle both halves. A window opens; staff submit preferences and time-off requests; the window closes; the generator builds a schedule that satisfies the hard rules, honours as many preferences as it can, and distributes the remainder evenly. What people did not get is reported with the reason.

Time-off requests and request periods

The rest rules that bite

Twelve-hour patterns make minimum rest and consecutive-day limits the binding constraints rather than background detail. Both are hard rules here, enforced on generation and re-checked on every swap and open-shift claim.

A rotation between days and nights is where this shows up: the turnaround between a run of nights and the next day shift is the interval that gets violated by a well-meant swap.

Night rotation, counted

Nights are a counted burden like call. The tally shows the distribution, staff can see their own against the unit's, and the window can be long enough that night load evens out over a year rather than appearing even within one roster and not across four.

Fair call distribution covers the mechanism; it is the same one.

Related

• Clinic shift scheduling
• Reducing scheduling burnout