Self-roster blockouts

Included in this weeks release (The 20th since we launched the new version of our software in February!) is an often-requested feature for our self-rostering process: blockouts.

Usually users are asked to pick their shifts directly. For preference-based rostering this can involve picking lots and lots of shifts over a 3- or 6-month roster, for which the roster administrator then might only need to staff each person on a handful of shifts.

In many cases, especially for junior staff or senior doctors in public hospitals, roster administrators really only want to know what shifts people CANNOT do…it is hard enough building a roster when you have lots of choices…it is made a lot harder when one of the doctors has said they would prefer only Saturday 20th June and Monday 6th July.

So now roster builders can ask people to select blockout shifts. These work very similarly to normal selections:

• They can be used on selection-based and preference-based rostering

• They can be used in addition to, or instead of, normal quotas

• You can decide the number of blockouts that each person can select; each each person can be given a different number of blockouts if you wish.

• The blockout limits match the quota calculations. So if your quotas use points the blockouts will also use points; if your quotas separate weekdays and weekends then the blockouts will do the same. So it might be that Christmas Day is worth 5 normal shifts….so someone with 5 blockout points can spend them on Christmas Day, or choose 5 other shifts they would prefer not to do.

• Roster administrators can see the blockouts when they build the rosters.

• HosPortal’s auto-build algorthm will not staff anyone on a date they have a blockout, but administrators still have the ability to manually overwrite the blockouts if they want or need to.

Please get in touch if you think this can be helpful for your rosters.