The Role of Shift Filling Software in Addressing Staffing Shortages

It will be easier to understand the significance of shift-filling software for healthcare organizations if we clarify what problems occur due to staffing shortages. Instead of discussing the importance of staff planning software, let’s highlight the difficulties caused by the lack of staff in the healthcare industry.

More Workload on Staff

It’s no rocket science to discover that the shortage of healthcare professionals puts more pressure and workload on the existing staff. They have to take on more work and work longer hours, affecting their work-life balance. In short, more workload leads to stress and poor job satisfaction, affecting healthcare professionals’ mental and physical well-being.

Poor Quality Patient Care

Offering the finest quality patient care remains one of the most crucial responsibilities of healthcare organizations. However, due to the healthcare staff shortage, meeting the standards for quality patient care is often challenging. In other words, the unavailability of qualified and experienced healthcare professionals leads to a decrease in the quality of patient care. It results in longer wait times, less time spent with patients, and an increased risk of medical mistakes.

Makes it Challenging to Provide Emergency Services

The lack of well-trained staff makes it difficult for a healthcare organization to offer emergency services. Remember, it’s essential to have adequate staff to meet the needs of the patients effectively. A strain on emergency services affects the credibility of an organization to a great extent. People start losing trust in it, which eventually affects the business.

Increases Healthcare Costs

Higher healthcare costs result from various reasons, including staff shortage. Since different other kinds of arrangements are made to avoid the negative impact of staff shortage, it leads to higher costs. For example, due to the unavailability of competent and qualified staff, the healthcare organization has to refer the patient to a different facility – which might be more expensive.

Leads to Recruitment Problems

It’s essential to have healthcare experts in place to recruit new staff. A shortage of healthcare experts makes it challenging to recruit new staff. Irrespective of the industry, when a candidate is hired, there must be the right set of people in the recruitment panel to evaluate the skill set of the candidate in question. And the same applies to the healthcare industry.

In a nutshell, a shortage of healthcare staff leads to poor patient care, results in higher healthcare costs, creates difficulty in recruiting new staff, strains emergency services, etc.

Therefore, ensuring you always have enough skilled healthcare professionals is crucial. And one of the best ways to ensure you always have sufficient healthcare staff you need is to invest in shift scheduling software, also known as a healthcare staffing solution or health scheduler. All these are different terms for shift-filling software.

Shift-filling software plays a paramount role in managing healthcare staffing shortages. It does so by streamlining the strategy of filling open shifts and lessening the burden on management and human resource professionals. Such software programs assist available employees in discovering open shifts based on their skills, qualifications, availability, and preferences.

7 Reasons You Must Rely on Shift-Filling Software

1. Addressing Staffing Shortages

Shift-filling software is vital to address staffing shortages in the healthcare industry. Designed to solve the problems faced by healthcare organizations and healthcare professionals, shift-filling software automates filling open shifts or vacancies. It’s used by healthcare organizations such as multispeciality hospitals and clinics. Apart from that, long-term care facilities also use staff planning software.

So irrespective of whether you run a hospital or a long-term care facility in Canada, you can opt for software like StaffStat® to address your staffing shortages.

2. Reducing the Burden on Managers

One of the benefits of using a shift scheduler is that it helps managers to identify available employees who are qualified to fill open shifts in no time. Relying on shift planning software minimizes the time and effort needed to examine schedules and manually contact employees. This is highly valuable when shifts need to be filled on short notice in the healthcare industry.

3. Improving Employee Engagement

Apart from making the process of filling open shifts fast and more efficient, shift filling software also enhances employee engagement and satisfaction by enabling them to control their schedules per their requirements. Healthcare professionals can use shift planning software to set availability preferences and request time off. Doing so can help lower scheduling conflicts and ensure employees are in a better condition to sustain a healthy work-life balance.

4. Improving Efficiency

As a healthcare organization, if you want to improve your workforce management efficiency, you must rely on shift-filling software. It allows you to automate filling open shifts, saving considerable time and allowing you to focus on more critical tasks.

5. Sending Real-time Notifications to Staff

If you want to send real-time notifications to healthcare professionals about the availability of open shifts or vacancies, look no further than the shift scheduler. It makes it easier for healthcare professionals to respond immediately, making it effortless to fill available vacancies.

6. Streamlining Communication

If you look forward to streamlining staff and management communication, shift planning software solves your problem. Rather than depending on phone calls, emails, or other manual methods to fill open shifts, you should rely on the software to centralize communication and streamline the process for everyone concerned.

7. Reducing Healthcare Costs

Shift-filling software minimizes the costs associated with staffing shortages by filling open shifts fast. Talk about the revenue lost due to staffing shortages, overtime pay, or agency staff fees – investing in a shift scheduler helps save all these.

Apart from that, shift-filling software also makes it easier for your organization to provide quality care as you can always access well-trained healthcare professionals.

Conclusion

To conclude, shift-filling software can be a valuable addition to your organization if you want to manage staffing shortages and improve their scheduling processes.