HI305 Unit 5 Staffing Schedule Example

Five Specialists, Seven Days and One Empty Chair: A Unit 5 Staffing Schedule for a Document Imaging Team That Still Clears Its Queue When Someone Calls Out

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HI305: Management of Health Information

Unit 5 Staffing Schedule

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The hospital, the team, the shift times and the volumes are composite; the sources cited are real.

What the Schedule Has to Do

Paper reaches the department every day, but not evenly. Monday and Tuesday carry about 22 percent of the week's pages each, because weekend discharges arrive together, while Saturday and Sunday carry about 5 percent each. At the measured standard of 220 pages per productive hour, the weekly volume of about 41,600 pages needs about 189 productive hours. After the director approved half of a new position, the team has 5.5 full-time equivalents, about 220 paid hours and about 185 productive hours, with the release of information team lending one cross-trained person for eight hours on Mondays and Tuesdays. The schedule must place those hours where the paper arrives and survive one person calling out on any day.

The Pattern

Day shift runs 06:30 to 15:00 and evening shift 14:00 to 22:30, with an hour of overlap for handoff and help with the largest batches. Monday and Tuesday are staffed with three specialists on days, one on evenings and the release of information floater on days, five people in all. Wednesday through Friday have two on days and one on evenings. Saturday and Sunday each have one specialist on days, rotating so that every full-time specialist works one weekend day in four, a pattern each person can plan around. The half-time position works Monday and Tuesday evenings and one Friday day shift. Each person works a fixed pattern for four weeks at a time. Requests for leave are approved first come, first served, with no more than one person on planned leave on Mondays and Tuesdays. The schedule puts its strength where the paper lands, not where it is easy to staff. Five people on a Monday and one on a Sunday looks uneven on the calendar and even on the queue.

The Absence Test

The test assumes a specialist calls out on Monday, the heaviest day, with about 9,100 pages arriving. With four people working, the team produces about 6,900 pages that day at the standard rate, leaving about 2,200 more in the queue than if everyone had been present. On Tuesday, with full staff, the team clears about 8,700 pages against 9,100 arriving, falling further behind. Wednesday through Friday, with lower arrivals of about 5,200 a day and staffing that clears about 5,800, the team recovers about 600 pages a day. By Friday evening the queue is back where it started on Monday morning, and it never exceeds two days of work during the week.

What Fails With Two Out

If two people are out on a Monday, the arithmetic changes. The team falls about 4,400 pages behind on Monday alone and does not recover by Friday. The plan's response is set in advance: the supervisor first asks the release of information floater to stay a second day, then offers overtime of up to four hours a day to the evening specialist, and if the queue passes three days, notifies the director and asks units to hold nonurgent outside records for a week. Overtime is capped because longer hours are linked to more errors and injuries, and fatigue in indexing work shows up as misfiled pages (Dembe et al., 2005).

How the Evening Shift Works

The evening specialist works mostly alone after the overlap hour, so the schedule gives that shift the most predictable work. Day staff prepare and sort the largest batches before 15:00, and the evening specialist scans and indexes them. Evening work also includes the morning's quality flags, which need concentration and benefit from a quieter floor. Placing the half-time position on Monday and Tuesday evenings doubles evening capacity on the two days when the queue builds. The evening specialist also has a written list of whom to call if a scanner fails, since no supervisor is on site after 17:00.

Fairness and Morale

Fixed patterns, a predictable weekend share and first come, first served leave were chosen because staff rated unpredictability as their main complaint in the last engagement survey. Research on job design links predictability and control over one's work to satisfaction and retention, and a team of five cannot afford to lose one experienced specialist to a schedule that changes every week (Hackman & Oldham, 1976). The overlap hour also gives the evening specialist, who often works alone, time with the day team.

Review

The supervisor will review the queue each Friday for the first eight weeks and adjust the pattern if Monday's backlog is not cleared by Thursday. Any change in volume from the two new sources of paper, which the department hopes to remove, will be built into the next four-week pattern. Staffing plans in health information departments work best when they are revisited as volume changes rather than set once a year (McWay, 2020).

References

Dembe, A. E., Erickson, J. B., Delbos, R. G., & Banks, S. M. (2005). The impact of overtime and long work hours on occupational injuries and illnesses: New evidence from the United States. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 62(9), 588-597. https://doi.org/10.1136/oem.2004.016667

Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250-279. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7

McWay, D. C. (2020). Today's health information management: An integrated approach (3rd ed.). Cengage Learning.