6 Shortcuts to Simplify Employee Scheduling at Long-Term Care Centers

In managing the exacting balance of patient care and proper staff levels in healthcare facilities, you can’t afford to take shortcuts. From medical professionals to support staff, and even to the managers tasked with employee scheduling, it’s imperative you get it right.

Fortunately, these shortcuts help your facility find that delicate balance while also enabling you to save money, stay in compliance, and improve overall efficiency in your facility.

Shortcut #1: Automate Perfectly Optimized Schedules

Imagine your team automatically creating data-driven schedules based on critical parameters, such as employee availability, shift coverage and skillset requirements, and workload. Picture effortlessly generated shifts with the exact number of staff members of each type to provide quality care for residents or patients.

No longer does your scheduling manager have to manually forecast staffing needs, considering factors such as patient or resident acuity, seasonal variations, staff overtime management, or historical trends. The right employee scheduling software:

• Reduces understaffing or overstaffing
• Ensures that resources are used effectively
• Saves hours of manual work for managers
• Reduces the likelihood of scheduling errors
• Monitors overtime management, payroll and reporting

Shortcut #2: Let Staff Swap Shifts and Manage their Time-Off Requests

Delegating some of your work to employees is a win-win for managers. Employee scheduling software that allows employees to easily request time off and swap shifts with the other employees eases the scheduling burden on managers while adding to employee satisfaction. Free up your managers’ time for other important tasks with a solution that provides a self-service portal where employees can submit their requests, which are then automatically processed and integrated into the schedule—ensuring they follow your center’s staffing policies.

Shortcut #3: Breathe Easy with Automated Compliance and Certification Tracking

Never worry again that an unqualified employee may be scheduled, creating a risk of compliance violations for your long-term care facility, outpatient care center or physician’s office. The right employee scheduling tools will seamlessly:

Track employees’ certifications and qualifications to ensure they are scheduled for the appropriate shifts.

Automatically alert managers when an employee’s certification is about to expire or when a new certification is required.

Provide easy reporting in case of an audit.

Shortcut #4: Streamline Employee Communication and Collaboration

Scheduling is notoriously fraught with the potential for miscommunication. With the right employee scheduling tools, you can ensure employees never miss an urgent shift change message again. You and your employees will love using employee scheduling software that includes built-in communication and collaboration tools to make it easy to stay in touch. Remove the headache of trying to filter messages coming through email, phone calls, and text, by centralizing it all in one place.

Shortcut #5: Embrace Rules

Customized employee scheduling rules will become your new best friend. Choose an employee scheduling software that allows you to build schedules according to the specific needs of your long-term care center. This can include setting minimum staffing levels for each shift, ensuring the right staff members are on duty for specific tasks, defining and automating pay differential tracking and even location-based time tracking for your different facilities.

Shortcut #6: Enable Mobile Scheduling Access

Give employees access to their schedules from their mobile devices with employee scheduling that includes a reliable, intuitive mobile app. You’ll increase employee satisfaction and reduce scheduling errors due to miscommunication or lack of access to schedules.

How TCP Can Help

TCP Software’s time, attendance and employee scheduling solutions streamline workforce management, freeing you to stay focused on what matters most: patient care. Our Humanity Scheduling software offers advanced scheduling, shift trading, and self-scheduling features that make it simple for long-term care facilities, physician’s offices, and outpatient care centers to reduce labor costs, increase staff satisfaction, and ensure compliant and exemplary shift coverage.

Learn more or contact us.