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Changing to new Shift Patterns |
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VISUAL ROTA from CDT | The Old Vicarage, Station Road Rolleston, Newark, Notts Great Britain. NG23 5SE Tel/Fax +44 1 636 816466/816882 E-mail: vrota@btinternet.com |
Ó 2000 CDT All rights reserved What Can Visual Rota Do?
E-mail vrota@btinternet.com |
Example & PictureUser Guide |
Shift Pattern Details |
Theory and creating the staffing scheduleHelp File(50k) |
Ordering USA |
Ordering UK |
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Video about Visual Rota |
Statistics & Decision Making |
FAQs |
Training |
Guestbook |
Annualised Hours |
Continuous Understaffing |
Overstaffing |
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Resisting Change |
What If: Analysis |
Care Plans | Newsgroup? anyone interested? |
What Visual Rota Does
| Similar duty schedules from month to month? Create a master copy and use it again and again. You only have to change the staff names as staff change |
Holiday planning a problem? Too many staff off at the same time? Now at a glance you can see- its color coded |
Sickness Do you think its a problem?. Now at a glance you can see- its color coded |
You can choose your time period to suit yourselves. You can do the schedule Weekly, 2 weekly, 4 or 5 weekly or monthly. Start at any date and finish at any date |
| Input your duty schedules from previous years. They will show you how efficient you are compared with your predecessor. Printout the previous duty schedules to have pristine copies of old records. Check your payroll data against the computer for errors. |
You can have your existing shifts. Add new shifts. Change the hours for each shift. Experiment with shifts. Optimize your shifts to match your workload | ||
| Record Keeping. Keep all your staff attendance records by using the roster on the computer. Instant retrieval/minimum paperwork and you can even use them in court as evidence should a dispute arise. |
Import the schedule into spreadsheet packages for further analysis and graphical presentations. We use the program to produce charts such as Nurse minutes per patient per day, etc |
What if Analysis See below about doing this type of analysis |
Materials Costing and Estimating Keep track of day-to-day costs by using Visual Rota's unique features. Estimate and cost out projects using real prices and labor costs |
| System Requirements. To run Visual Rota you require:
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Materials Costing & Estimating
The task of costings and estimating the materials required to run any establishment can be long and time consuming. It is difficult to do by hand because of the sheer number of calculations that have to be done by hand. What is required is a computer program that can handle the task in the same way that we think.
Visual Rota can do any amount of job costing and estimating with ease. It can combine manhours and materials on the same page.
Examples.
Catering, Heating, Electricity, incontinence products, transportation, etc.
A detailed breakdown of costs on a day-by-day basis usually exposes anomalies in the use of materials by staff. Some staff are naturally better at using materials than other and this can be spotted by analysis. Then it can be possible to ensure that best practise is established throughout.
Shift Staffing Levels
Each shift requires manning levels established through trial and error, or tradition, or as a legal requirement. If the same numbers of staff are on duty at the same time of day, then a natural routine is established and all staff members know their task, and more importantly that of the fellow shift workers. (Whether the established manning levels are correct is another matter, since the shift may be understaffed or over staffed at that level, what's important is the routine for shifts which always have the same numbers of staff on duty).
Visual Rota will give the numbers of staff on each shift and the total staff hours of each day. As long as the hours are the same each day, then the same amount of work is done each day. Another way of looking at this is; if each day has the same tasks to do, then it should require the same number of manhours to do it. And this is where Visual Rota comes into its own. It will tell you immediately if you are under or over staffed and the number of associated hours, so then you can change people around. And, of course, it is efficient to move staff from shifts that are overstaffed to shifts that are understaffed. Unfortunately, contracts of employment get in the way of efficiency and staff members are sometimes put onto shifts where they are not needed just to use their hours up. It happens time and again that having an extra person on a shift results in less work being done on that shift.
The main reason for the drop in efficiency on a shift is due to the break in routine. Everyone has to re-learn their job, to take account of the extra person. Each job slows down, so that the extra person can be used they have to be taught, but the routine job is now different because two people are doing the job that used to be done by one person. So, the person who used to do the job has to re-learn the job based on two people doing it, and then teach the extra person the job. I am sure you understand the picture. Everyone on the shift has to re-learn their job. Efficiency plummets and with it morale. To get over this problem, the extra staff member is often given a special job that is never usually done because of staff shortages, such as heavy cleaning or a patients outing. The problem here is that, not being a routine task, no one has prepared anything, and so everyone on the shift has to help out, in addition to their normal tasks.
These scenarios are often encounted, and at these times it is sometimes a sensible option to pay the staff member to stay at home. Visual Rota has the ability to move staff shifts into the future as far as you want, and then use your current overstaffing to correct understaffing problems during peak holiday seasons, for instance. Our experience is that as long as the staff realise that they won't lose out, they are amenable to this sort of shift rota.