Centralized staffing can save organizations thousands of dollars monthly in nurse staffing wages, staff attendance, and patient outcomes. The entire organization, including the nursing staff and the beneficiaries, often experiences an uplift in reaching more objectives when centralized scheduling is adopted, and patient experience is often enhanced.
What is centralized scheduling in nursing?
Centralized scheduling is a scheduling process where a central office manages all nurse staffing, either within an entire organization or across many organizations. With a centralized staffing approach, the central office deals with outgoing schedules and incoming staff requests.
Organizational structure and culture determine which centralized staffing model you can use for the best results. In a decentralized staffing model, for example, six schedulers in the staffing office can manage a maximum of 80 nurses. In a centralized staffing model, one dedicated scheduler can manage over 500 nurses across 25 units located in three hospitals.
Healthcare organizations, from large hospitals to small clinics, must manage their nursing staff. This mammoth task used to require a robust auxiliary staff – a host of schedulers or nurse leaders who used hours of patient care time to schedule their nursing staff. The old-fashioned scheduling was location-dependent on the premises and is now known as the decentralized model. A hybrid scheduling process combines centralized and decentralized staffing.
Why is centralized scheduling important in healthcare?
Studies show a clear correlation between competent management of the nurse scheduling process through a central staffing office and satisfaction levels. The need for centralized staffing is visible through the problems in the scheduling process that healthcare facilities must deal with on a constant basis.
Some of the problems that necessitate a centralized scheduling process include:
- Discontinuity of service occurs when part of the scheduling matrix fails in one facility or across the group, resulting in staffing shortages.
- Non-automated scheduling methodologies and non-automated communication processes consume resources at high speed. More time, money, and personnel are required as organizations manage staffing.
- Errors occur in the form of no-call, no-show nurses, or other staffing shortages that affect the entire workforce.
The benefits of using centralized scheduling
Using a centralized scheduling process offers advantages for managing the nurses who staff your health system.
Some advantages of a centralized system include:
- Streamline processes for an unlimited number of nurses
- Save time by leveraging the work hours of the staffing office to manage the scheduling of multiple locations. This holistic approach makes the best use of all staffing resources across your organization.
- Create business operation efficiency by having a few schedulers doing the work of an entire staffing office.
- It is an easy way to spot patterns in nursing staff behavior, allowing you to develop effective policies throughout your health system. This also allows all levels of management and staffing officers to view staffing, from the service line to the facility to the regional levels.
- Take advantage of leading technology that allows for smarter scheduling using predictive analysis and AI.
- Improve resource management by ensuring that nurses with different qualifications work in the department where they are needed most and in the most effective combinations.
- Reduce chances of scheduling errors across facility(ies).
- Increase staff attendance and adherence to the work schedule through better management of nurses’ schedules.
- Centralize your nurse schedule records for floating nurses, standby nurses, vacations, and absences.
- Due to the reduction of stress and increase in being organized, increased nurse job satisfaction frequently accompanies the adoption of centralized scheduling.
- A major advantage is when management, from senior managers to actual unit managers, spends less time on staffing, which frees up time for other tasks.
Choosing whether to have centralized vs. decentralized staffing is a major discussion, and it depends on what type of facility you run. There are advantages and disadvantages to both patterns. Each healthcare facility must examine if the advantages listed here for centralized scheduling make sense for its healthcare setup.
6 Steps to Installing Centralized Scheduling Practices
There are a few simple steps to follow in order to install a centralized model for nursing staff management in your healthcare facility:
- Decide where to locate your central staffing office (CSO). Will it be located in a real work environment or be remote?
- List all nursing types and personnel that will be subject to the centralized scheduling processes and decide which, if any, will be exceptions.
- Explain the changes to your staff and list the advantages for the nursing staff and the healthcare facility. This makes the change clearer and more actionable for your staff. The secret to success is to break the deployment into clearly defined phases with key objectives at each stage.
- Introduce the program and explain that team effort will be needed to make it work. Make sure there is sufficient support available for all members of the project and full transparency so that everyone from practice managers to the central staffing office has a good idea of how the deployment is unfolding. Ensure that all nurses have a secure way to contact the central staffing office to request changes to the centralized scheduling that exists for that nurse.
- Collect data through your new digital staffing channels regarding the success of the centralized staffing deployment and the staffing patterns on the ground, as well as how this is affecting the functionality of the organization as a whole. Data delivery and analysis are the key to the success of the plan.
- Check your key performance indicators to ensure an ongoing smooth supply of staffing needs to match patient needs; make sure to reassess at frequent intervals. Create standardized attendance policies for your healthcare organization. This includes addressing cybersecurity data protection requirements.
Consolidating systems and integrating nursing staff data in your centralized scheduling system
It is advisable to use a centralized scheduling model that integrates with your other management systems, such as payroll and staff well-being. Enable tools for sending messages to staff about your scheduling processes from inside the centralized scheduling system. Better communication offers stability and predictability for nursing staff and increases the quality of their work life. One of the key reasons that health systems delay switching from decentralized scheduling is difficulties with integration; therefore, choosing a system that integrates easily with other staff management programs is key to a successful centralized transformation.
Dropstat offers centralized scheduling for all types of healthcare facilities
Dropstat offers a top-of-the-line, AI-powered nurse scheduling tool and a centralized scheduling process to help your healthcare facility succeed in centralized scheduling. Using predictive analysis, which takes account of patient acuity, Dropstat helps you calculate whether you have enough nursing staff scheduled at every time of the day or month and whether HPPD is being met.
Dropstat was created by an experienced nurse who knows what nursing and scheduling demands. Centralized scheduling contributes to bottom-line success by increasing the quality of your health system and cutting costs. Dropstat allows you to schedule your staff in this way up to 2 months in advance.
Schedule a demo with Dropstat today to see how it can help your organization set up centralized schedules.
