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If you were to ask any medical professional to name their favorite part of working in healthcare, very few would say it is working nights, weekends, and holidays. Working too many of these shifts, especially night shifts, can have negative effects on workers’ health and well-being.Yet, keeping those shifts staffed with talented healthcare professionals is essential to providing good care to patients. Over the years, scheduling has evolved to reduce the negative effects of working those shifts while maintaining adequate staffing, and the best medical scheduling software is now flexible enough to include innovative schedules.Here are a few schedules you might like to try.
Types of Rotating Medical Schedules
The DuPont Shift
The American chemical company, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company developed the DuPont Shift Pattern in the 1950s to solve the 24/7 staffing problems they were experiencing in their factories. The shift pattern also works well in other industries, including medicine.
The DuPont Shift Pattern uses 12-hour shifts in a complex pattern.
• 4 consecutive nights on/3 days off
• 3 days on/1 day off
• 3 nights on/3 days off
• 4 days on/7 consecutive days off
The Pitman Shift
Nobody knows who invented the Pitman Shift, but we do know that it was developed in Pitman, NJ, to schedule law enforcement officers.The Pitman Shift schedule uses four teams that work 12-hour shifts to provide 24-hour coverage. Typically, two teams cover days while the other two teams work nights. In any given 24-hour period, one team is on the day shift, one team is on the night shift, and two teams are off. The rotating schedule offers a 3-day weekend every other weekend.The 2-2-3 pattern of the Pitman Shift looks like this:
• 2 shifts on/2 days off
• 3 shifts on/2 days off
• 2 shifts on/3 days off
The 2-2-3-2 2-3 rotating shift
Sometimes referred to as the Panama Schedule, the 2-2-3-2 2-3 rotating shift is a variation on the Pitman shift. The origin of the name “Panama Schedule” is unclear, but U.S. military or government personnel working on the Panama Canal may have coined the name.
Like the Pitman Shift Pattern, the Panama Schedule uses four teams working 12-hour shifts to provide 24/7 coverage and guarantee every other weekend off. The main differences between the Panama and Pitman Schedules are their rotation patterns and cycle lengths. The Panama schedule typically features a 28-day, 2-2-3 cycle, which forces frequent, automatic rotation between day and night shifts.
This schedule uses 12-hour shifts with a 2-2-3 pattern:
• 2 shifts on/2 shifts off
• 3 shifts on/2 shifts off
• 2 shifts on/3 shifts off
• Repeat
Workers will alternate between day and night shifts every 2 to 4 weeks.
These schedule patterns are complex, which makes them difficult to implement without exceptional shift scheduling software. Introduced for emergency medicine scheduling in 1989, ByteBloc is a robust, versatile, and flexible physician scheduling system that makes scheduling easy. ByteBloc offers flexible schedules with a variety of day types, multi-location schedules, shift definitions, shift relationships, and classifications.
For more information on medical scheduling software that can handle complex schedule patterns, connect with ByteBloc.
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