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Things change quickly in the world of medical staff scheduling, and a number of factors shape these changes. Fortunately, your healthcare organization can address many of the forces affecting your shift scheduling in 2026.
Three Factors Shaping Your Shift Scheduling this Year
1. Financial constraints that limit scheduling flexibility
Labor and supply costs are skyrocketing, while increasing inflation and interest rates limit your organization’s financial wiggle room. To operate within these economic boundaries, your organization may focus on improving efficiency at the expense of scheduling flexibility.
Tight purse strings can cause longer wait times, larger patient loads, increased staff burnout, and reduced availability. These effects can force healthcare organizations to rely on reactive, rather than proactive, approach to scheduling.
2. Labor shortages
Almost all sources predict healthcare labor shortages. The American Hospital Association predicts a shortage of about 100,000 critical health care workers by the year 2028, for example, and Medicus foresees a shortage of 96,430 full-time equivalent (FTE) physicians.
3. Reliance on travel nurses
Travel nurses were in high demand during the pandemic, but reliance on travel nurses declined in the following years. Many analysts expect the travel nurse market to stabilize in 2026, with consistently higher demands for travel nurses in specialized roles, such as in the ICU and emergency department.
What You Can Do to Improve Shift Scheduling this Year
Understand the factors influencing shift scheduling at your organization
While these factors will affect nearly all healthcare organizations this year, they may affect each organization differently. Hospitals near medical and nursing schools may have better talent pipelines than do those without a college or university nearby, for example, while rural hospitals may benefit from flexible shift scheduling to compensate for low staffing numbers.
Review your organization’s attractiveness when it comes to new hires
Physicians and staff expect flexibility, meaningful work, opportunities for growth, and a supportive work culture. Organizations that fall short of these expectations will likely lose talent to hospitals that meet or exceed expectations.
Strengthen the pipeline of local workers
Relying on travel nurses may be efficient, but it can be quite pricey. Try to reduce your organization’s reliance on travel nurses by hiring locally, whenever possible.
Prioritize employee well-being
Burnout is a key factor in medical staff turnover; prioritizing your workers’ well-being can help reduce both burnout and turnover.Ways to improve staff well-being include:
• Providing adequate rest and meal breaks
• Offering mental health support
• Ensuring a safe, supportive work environment
• Maintaining easy-to-use, powerful shift scheduling software that puts workers in control, without leaving you under- or over-staffed
Embrace technology
Technology offers a wide variety of solutions to busy healthcare organizations. Telehealth, digital tools, and shift scheduling software all ease workload while improving efficiency.For more information on how medical staff scheduling can help your hospital deal with the shifting landscape of healthcare, consult with ByteBloc.
Our emergency medicine scheduling was founded more than 30 years ago by an emergency physician. Today, ByteBloc Software offers medical staff scheduling software to schedule other medical professionals. Emergency departments in all 50 states, as well as in Canada and several other countries use ByteBloc. Our physician scheduling software and medical staff scheduling software can help your organization keep up with the changes in 2026 and beyond.
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