Case Study: Dargaville Medical Centre

Background

Cornerstone is a New Zealand general-practice accreditation program run by the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners. It is not a US accreditation.

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 schedules to maximize the efficacy and satisfaction of the staff available to her. Her schedule 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 scheduling 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 schedule." - Judy Harris, Practice Manager

All this has to be done every four weeks with this level of detail, it's surprising that schedule 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 schedules 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 schedule parameters within the Rosterlab app.

"With Rosterlab, the process has been dramatically reduced, and believe it will only get quicker. Rosterlab has been extremely responsive to our suggestions and needs for our scheduling. This included making MULTIPLE additions and alterations to their programme to suit our requirements."

- Judy, Practice Manager

Nowadays, the Rosterlab AI generates a schedule for Dargaville Health Clinic in under a minute. Each new schedule is created specifically to suit the current situation, taking into account changes in leave and other requests. The practice manager checks over this schedule with access to a bevy of dynamic statistics and makes some human adjustments within the Rosterlab app. All in all, the entire process is now around three hours a month.

Conclusion

"Rosterlab has been a pleasure to work with, and we highly recommend it to other medical practices and businesses. If Rosterlab can help with our complicated scheduling needs, we are confident it will work for anyone." - Judy, Practice Manager

Rosterlab is dedicated to bringing time savings, union compliance, fairer schedules and more empowered staff to healthcare organizations like Dargaville Medical Centre. You are the healthcare professionals; let us be the scheduling professionals for you.

Book a demo today for your unique scheduling case.