STREAMLINING NURSING STAFFING NEEDS; The Use of AGOS Chart

Written by Prince Assandoh-Mensah in 2020

Projecting and proper management of the staffing needs of every healthcare organization plays a significant role in improving employee satisfaction, and to a large extent, better patient outcomes.

However, the complex nature of staffing schedules for many hospitals and large organizations, makes executing this administrative function an uneasy task. It goes beyond just assigning a group of individuals to a particular unit or ward.

In most instances, the nature of hospital work requires staff to be present all day on a shift based system. Though hospital operations do not halt on weekends and legal holidays, the nurse manager/supervisor must ensure that each staff benefits from some stipulated days of rest per week (mostly 2days) and also from every legal holiday. Aside that paid offs/leave/vacation and other unplanned leaves such as sick leave and to some extent, maternity leave must also be granted.

The nurse manager/supervisor manages all these whiles balancing it with adequate staff flow per every shift for proper functioning of the ward/unit and patient care.

This makes projecting staffing needs: including daily, weekly or monthly staffing needs per departments (while balancing that with holidays and unplanned offs such as sick leave) and proper planning of employee annual leave (while avoiding future constraints) a huge challenge for most nurse managers and supervisors. Due to this, many nursing departments face ‘piled leave and holidays’ yet to be granted to their staff whereas others face periodic shortage of staff due to over-granting of employee leave (more than what the department can bear).

The AGOS Chart is a simple chart that has come to solve all these challenges. It is meant to guide nurse managers/supervisors and other human resource managers of large organizations to project and plan their staffing needs. For every number of staff available at every unit or departments, the chart is able to predict the following

• The number of staff that needs to be available for work (for timetable planning for the day, week, month or year).
• The minimum number of staff that needs to be assigned to work daily.
• The number of staff that needs to be always on leave.

For instance, if you happen to have 8 Nurses and 5 Ward Assistants on your unit or ward, the chart can help you to know the number of Nurses that needs to be on leave, the number that must be assigned to work daily and the number that will be available for drafting of your timetable.

*You can request for the chart for free by sending a request to assandohmensah@gmail.com*