Why Focus on Workforce Scheduling?
Many healthcare organizations are facing an urgent need to achieve financial efficiencies while maintaining advanced levels of care. Effective management of the workforce is a critical enabler of the achievement of these strategic goals; with the ultimate goal being excellent patient care and experience. A commitment to optimization of scheduling practices within your organization also demonstrates a commitment to leadership and staff in supporting their work to deliver that outstanding patient experience. Mobilizing the workforce in more effective ways enables them to perform their roles more effectively and efficiently; while providing a higher degree of predictability for all. Additional pressures such as a changing and shrinking workforce, growing patient populations, and direct policy interventions such as Health System Funding Reform driven by MOHLTC quality agendas are challenging the better use of limited resources — to sustain service delivery.
In healthcare, availability of the right resource is often the single biggest influence on patient outcomes, staff engagement, and financial performance. Nearly 70% of average healthcare budgets are comprised of workforce costs, and total workforce spending is an aggregate of the staffing decisions made shift-by-shift and day-by-day at all levels of the organization. Considering all of the shifts on all of the schedules across the organization, if each shift is just a little bit more expensive than it could ideally be, or does not make best use of a scarce resource, the cumulative waste and negative impacts to quality can be staggering.
The quality impacts of poor staffing can affect the patient experience through adverse events and hospital acquired conditions, poor continuity of care, or the inability to open beds. Employees are also affected by high-stress working conditions and the pressure to work extra hours. This can lead to poor work-life balance and high levels of fatigue. This ultimately affects employee retention and the ability to recruit staff creating a reliance on premium labor. This results in increased spend and a negative impact on overall system sustainability.
Effective utilization of your workforce is realized by a strong, stable foundation. Foundational elements such as master rotations secured to budget and baseline and aligned relief workforce strategies can be sustained by strong business practice. In turn there is tighter control over staffing costs and workforce utilization is better operationalized. With the right controls in place, units can schedule according to their budgets and operational needs, and open shifts can be filled far in advance with the right skill and at the lowest cost. The ability for staff to remain loyal to their workplace can also increase. Internal churn, upskilling and redistribution can be more proactively managed with a higher degree of predictability for leaders and employees on the frontline.
Assessing Your Current Maturity and Opportunities to Improve
An Opportunity Assessment from Workforce Edge will analyze the current state of scheduling and rotation services and the related impacts in terms of costs, data quality, management workload, staff satisfaction, collective agreement compliance, scheduling and relief processes, governance, rotations, and software and/or scheduling tools. Our proprietary Workforce Deployment Maturity Model© is built on a number of dimensions and involves four primary work streams: (1) analysis of workforce utilization data; (2) assessment of staffing model and current rotations; (3) polling of key stakeholder groups; and (4) assessment of current technology capability and usage.
By Shawn Drake and Tila Smith, Managing Partners, Workforce Edge
Nearly 70% of healthcare costs are comprised of workforce costs, and total workforce spending is an aggregate of the staffing decisions made shift-by-shift and day-by-day at all levels of the organization.
Workforce Edge specializes in workforce scheduling and startegic relief workforce planning providing a series of comprehensive solutions to the complex challenge of providing cost-effective patient care.
Our tool sets enable care model change and implementation in reasonable and safe ways.
We help develop strategies across a range of heath systems at the Ministry level, with local Authorities, and with single hospitals.
The schedule and the processes around it is the most emotional place for staff as they are the interface between work and home. We bring the critical change management required to transform.
The overall return on investment in improving staff scheduling processes, guidelines and constructs is substantial.
Improvement includes direct financial returns that result from improving the timeliness for filling shifts, reducing scheduling errors, and reducing overtime and agency use that results from improperly structured staffing models.
There are indirect returns such as improving employee engagement and retention through a more transparent and reliable scheduling and timekeeping environment.
Follow-on collaborative process design work creates commitment throughout an organization to embrace the change, and sets the stage for successful improvements to your staff scheduling and deployment environment.
If you would like assistance in creating the roadmap for your scheduling improvements, and identifying your tangible benefits, please contact us at: info@workforce-edge.com
Leveraging real data from your payroll systems, targeted workforce surveying, and analysis of schedules and staffing levels – a workforce utilization model will be developed to quantify the benefits that you can expect as a result of overhauling your approach to staff scheduling.
Once the current state is clearly defined, we work with our clients to plan the future state with the development of a comprehensive business case including detailed business and staffing models, development of a balanced scorecard, and completion of a project plan with linkages to other strategic priorities of the organization. The Opportunity Assessment quantifies the achievable benefits of moving to an optimized state inclusive of improvements in processes and systems. These improvements also enable you to achieve the full benefit from other initiatives such as benchmarking, care model transformation or volume optimization initiatives.
Our experience ranges from direct insertion by the Ministry to support provincial healthcare operations in entirety, to enabling provincial and/or large urban health systems consolidations, to simply helping a unit manager build an optimized rotation, through to supporting a small community operation to better understand a shift fill order. It is possible to transform scheduling environments as staff engagement initiatives, as opposed to executing on staff scheduling or “cost optimization” projects, that have “some” staff engagement.
