For long term care facilities, a scheduling staff is vital to delivering quality care to their residents. Their job can be made easier by way of scheduling software for nursing homes, which can help skilled nurses and other long term care providers manage shift schedules and balance skill sets across schedules.
Nursing homes need an adequate number of nurses working at any given time to ensure the proper delivery of health services and quality care for their residents. Currently, the industry faces a crippling staffing crisis that may cause nurses to be overworked, which leads to high turnover. That is why nursing home scheduling is so beneficial, as it ensures that nurses are not spread thin and are not overworked. Additionally, proper nurse scheduling results in fewer accidents, fewer infections, and better care for residents.
Thankfully, there are no software solutions that make scheduling far easier than ever before. Experience Care’s Resident and Resource Scheduling Module provides a quick and effective way for long term care facilities to accomplish all the above and much more.This state-of-the-art system eliminates disconnected appointment books and replaces them with one connected system that allows for the scheduling of:
- Appointments for individual residents, such as care plan conferences and physician appointments
- Activities with multiple residents, such as a trip to a community event and bingo
- Access to resources related to an appointment, such as equipment, transportation, and meeting rooms
- Recurring appointments
In addition to the above, NetSolutions’ Resident Scheduling long term care software has the following features:
- Custom calendars for staff and residents and resources: Nursing staff have their own calendar view where they can add, update or delete any meetings or appointments. There are also calendars for residents, prospects, and activities.
- Resource scheduling: With NetSolutions’ Resident Scheduling nursing home software, nurses can schedule one appointment for an individual resident requiring multiple resources or schedule one or more resources for multiple residents.
- Report generation: Scheduling reports can be generated as PDFs and printed. Also, reports can be filtered by resident, prospect, staff, resource, or activity.
- Detailed resident information: Resident entries will contain information such as resident name, ID, and room information
- Recurring tasks/appointments: Nurses can easily set up routine medical appointments for residents in a nursing home, using this senior living software
- User-friendliness: The software is easy to use and requires little training. The interface resembles modern software UI with which computer-literate nurses will be familiar.
- Free training: Should one find it challenging to use the resident scheduling software, Experience Care offers free training courses for nurses and other long term care professionals.
With the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) having introduced Nursing Home Compare and the Five-Star Quality Rating System, consumers can now easily compare the quality of nursing homes. Hence, having the best scheduling software for nursing homes can make all the difference and result in a better Five-Star Quality Rating for the nursing home.
Contact us here if you would like to test drive our user-friendly nursing home software.
Best Practices for Nursing Home Scheduling
There has been a cultural shift from institutionalized care to more personal care in recent years. Senior Care notes that nursing home scheduling previously involved having strict schedules. All residents were expected to wake up, go to bed, sleep, bathe and even eat at a specified, uniform time. Now though, thanks to nursing home scheduling software, residents have their own unique routines that are easy to track and update.
When creating a nursing home work schedule, one would be wise to take into consideration the following recommendations from Chron:
- Set the worker minimum: NCBI notes that nursing homes are required to have a sufficient number of nurses in the facility at any given time. The minimum number of nurses required vary from state to state. A nursing home should understand their minimums and have the director of nursing (DON) use that for guidance when creating schedules.
- Allow staff input: Higher job satisfaction among nurses has been linked with higher levels of care. One of the ways to increase workplace job satisfaction is by asking for staff input when making a nursing home schedule. Long term care facilities can ask their staff when they would like to work and provide employees with a simple system where they can request time off.
- Post timely schedules: Schedules should be placed in an open and easy to access place. Additionally, the expectations of staff members should be clearly communicated. For example, suppose they are expected to be in the facility at a specific time. In that case, it should be clearly communicated in advance. Giving advance notice helps employees sort their personal affairs and be ready when they have a shift.
- Get creative to avoid overtime: Fatigue can be a problem in nursing homes and can result in accidents and mistakes. Hence, schedulers should get creative and give workers time to rest and take care of their personal affairs. Part-time workers can provide valuable relief, so keep them in mind to fill in when a full-time employee needs to have a break.
6 Benefits of Nursing Home Scheduling Software
If one is wondering how to schedule nursing staff, then nursing home scheduling software may be the answer. The benefits of scheduling software for nursing homes include:
- Less printing: Using a nursing home scheduling software means there is no longer a need for paper to print out schedules. Instead, nurses can easily access the schedules on a computer or mobile device, and any changes made to the schedule do not need re-printing.
- Better coordination of care: Scheduling software for nursing homes enables nurses to coordinate resident care, ensuring that a resident is not forgotten or neglected when a nurse leaves or takes time off.
- Easy reporting and overviews: Reports can be generated with the simple click of a button, enabling the DON to know who is doing what and when. Additionally, any changes to the schedule can instantly be made and will be immediately made visible for all nurses in the nursing home.
- Effective overtime management: Overtime can be difficult to track and manage. Some states have regulations or union requirements that govern the number of hours nurses work and the maximum overtime. Nursing home scheduling software makes the process easy by the use of reports, tracking hours worked, and nurse scheduling templates that ensure regulatory compliance.
- Greater employee engagement and feedback: As was discussed above, staff input is an integral part of creating a nursing home schedule. Scheduling software for nursing homes allows for staff to quickly review a proposed schedule, provide their input and review the changes, all from different locations.
- Fewer errors: Manually created schedules often result in errors, such as multiple nurses booking to use a limited resource. Scheduling software for nursing homes helps prevent such errors from occurring by tracking redundant entries.
The Importance of Scheduling Software for Nursing Homes
Scheduling software for nursing homes is a must in this day and age. Nursing homes need to be as efficient as possible while providing the best care possible to their residents. Experience Care’s Resident and Resource Scheduling Module provides a quick and effective way for long term care facilities to minimize cost, enable better coordination of care, schedule the use of resources, and avoid schedule conflicts.
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