Satisfied staff is an important factor on the job market in times of a shortage of skilled workers. You can find out how to achieve (more) satisfaction with the right workforce planning in our article.
Optimal duty scheduling in hospitals and clinics must do more than simply assign employees to a task. Because here the qualifications and training of the medical staff as well as the staff and shift requirements of the respective clinic must be taken into account as well as collective bargaining and individual regulations. With this multitude of factors, however, the needs of the employees are often ignored.
Granting service requests is more important than ever if you want to satisfy and retain highly qualified staff. You can do this by creating fair duty rosters. The advantages are obvious: duty rosters that are perceived as fair by the workforce ensure greater satisfaction – not only for those scheduled, but also for those responsible for the duty roster.
Due to the complexity of the planning problem in the creation of duty rosters in hospitals, they face numerous challenges: different services, needs and qualifications as well as labor law and collective bargaining agreements must be met. At the same time, the training of assistant doctors must be guaranteed and absences in the event of vacation and illness must be answered. Since all conditions are interrelated here, the planning problem cannot be broken down into sub-problems. Experience has shown that it is therefore impossible for many duty roster managers to also want to integrate the workforce’s service requests. Because even with the best will and the best approach, the needs of employees can only be insufficiently met with manual planning. At the same time, it can happen that the workload is unevenly distributed among the workforce, which causes dissatisfaction and frustration among many participants.
Satisfied staff vs. optimal duty scheduling
With manual duty scheduling, however, a lot of potential is wasted. What cannot be implemented in reality due to the size of the solution space for manual planning, can be achieved by automation solutions with integrated optimization methods.
With the help of software solutions, it is feasible to create duty rosters in an automated, demand-oriented, efficient and simple manner. But only a few providers integrate the aspect of fairness into their algorithms.
The advantages of digital software solutions in duty scheduling
Satisfied staff through fair duty scheduling
Planning quality through automation
Cost efficiency through automation
Our However, the PLANFOX personnel deployment planning software solution does exactly that. Because we are convinced that personnel deployment planning is not only made more efficient, opportunity costs are reduced and planning quality is increased, but that duty planner managers and employees should also benefit.
Since the start of the development of PLANFOX personnel deployment planning, scientific-mathematical methods of linear optimization have been incorporated into our algorithm, which also take into account the individual service requests of the employees.
Because PLANFOX Personnel Deployment Planning was developed in cooperation with the Clinic for Anesthesiology at the Klinikum rechts der Isar (MRI) , which is why the findings from the practice of duty roster design were incorporated into the programming from the start. The automated planning also runs with scientific-mathematical methods of linear optimization, which originate from the research of the Chair for Health Care Operations / Health Information Management of Prof. Jens Brunner at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Augsburg .
Author and contact person
Dr. Christopher Gross has been working as a software developer for XITASO since 2010. As part of his doctorate, he worked at the chair for Health Care Operations / Health Information Management of Prof. Jens Brunner at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Augsburg with innovative methods of optimizing workforce planning in the health sector. He has been working on the development of PLANFOX since 2014 and supports healthcare providers in adapting their planning processes.
