New award rules and payroll period settings
One of our most commonly requested features in recent years has been the ability to manage trainee doctor award rules (e.g. a NSW one, here) to prevent over-working and flag when an assignment might cause a doctor to break their allowed working hours. The fact that we do not already do this has been a matter of history: HosPortal was originally built to address shortcomings in the functionality of timesheet and payroll systems that are built to serve that function but are otherwise hopeless at managing staff deployment. We are looking at you, state government ‘rostering’ systems!
After many months of research and development, we have now launched the start of our shift work rules to address this need, which will work in parallel with our shift conflict rules that have been in place for years. And we have included the concept of a payroll period, to allow the rules to work in the way that many customers already think about such things.
Shift work rules
The new work rules are entirely flexible and can be created and edited by any roster administrator. Different rules can apply to different roles, for instance to create different rules for Consultants and Registrars.
From Release 28, which was live this week, roster administrators can:
Define payroll periods, such as fortnightly or monthly, with different payroll periods able to be defined for different roles.
Limit the number of hours or days to be worked over any number of days, weeks or payroll cycles.
Apply separate rules for weekday hours and weekend hours.
Separate ‘weekend days’ (so that Saturday and Sunday are treated as two separate days) from ‘weekends’ (so that Saturday and Sunday on the same weekend are treated as one event).
Manage ‘consecutive days’, for instance to limit the number of days required before taking a break.
These rules are checked when selecting staff into shifts and provide an alert to a roster administrator. Currently we cannot run the rules over an existing roster.
Further enhancements
This is the first wave of what will be an evolving feature: the list of rules and our approach is really only to get us started.
We have reviewed all the Australian medical awards for each Australian state and have thought about all the different types of rules they require. Although we have not implemented all these rules now the structure and design of our software has anticipated implementing them quickly in future and we hope to bring them to life in the coming months.
We also know that our roster-filling algorithms and automated rostering will benefit by using these rules. This will happen in the next few releases.
Shift conflict rules
Shift conflict rules, which have been in use for some years, are unchanged and managed separately. These allow such things as flagging shift overlaps, forcing separation between shifts (e.g. so that a user cannot work a day shift after a night shift or before a night shift), and will continue to be flagged on the roster with an alert icon.
