Case Study: Dargaville Medical Centre
Background
Dargaville Medical Centre is a Cornerstone Accredited General Practice comprising of experienced doctors, knowledgeable nurses, and friendly administrative staff. The dedicated staff there have over 12,000 registered patients.
The Incredibly Detailed Challenge
The practice manager, Judy, writes highly detailed rosters to maximise the efficacy and satisfaction of the staff available to her. Her roster writing challenge for just coverage includes scheduling shift-specific roles and ensuring adequate service coverage within the availability of the nursing team. Integrated into this challenge are the staggered shift times and rotation of specific duties to aid in cross-training the team there in all aspects of providing top-tier healthcare to the local community.
"The rostering requirements for our staff are an absolute nightmare, with multiple staff each having their own unique needs, e.g. days and hours they can work, along with multiple skill sets/roles that the practice needs to be fulfilled on a daily basis. This meant it could take a staff member several days to complete a four-week roster." - Judy Harris, Practice Manager
All this has to be done every four weeks with this level of detail, it's surprising that roster writing takes her only a couple of days a month. Those hours were spent in Excel, a process that Judy described as “an absolute nightmare”.
With RosterLab
When Rosterlab engaged with Dargaville Medical Centre, we saw firsthand the manual Excel process that Judy goes through. Rosterlab created an initial template to use as a starting point. This made it a lot easier for both parties to communicate on common ground, and within a few Zoom sessions, the sample rosters made by Rosterlab were looking quite close to the requirement. From then, all that was needed was a bit of training on how to make specific adjustments to the roster parameters within the Rosterlab app.
