Developing a one-team approach to meet three infusion centers’ staffing needs.

116 Background: Our cancer service line provides infusion services for oncology patients at three locations. The numbers of chairs vary by location from 10 to 30. Each location has a nurse manager. Staff are hired for specific locations. Hours of operation differ at each location, depending on patient needs. With increasing pressure to streamline operations and maintain productivity, along with challenges of RN vacancies and growing volumes, efforts were needed to coordinate staffing between locations to ensure best utilization of resources. Methods: The leadership team met to identify opportunities for improvement and develop an action plan. Issues identified included: Locations worked in silos to manage staffing issues and patient volumes. Decisions were made without consideration of the other locations; Staff were reluctant to float; Lack of consistent communication and comradery among managers/leads; Critical decisions were made inconsistently by staff; Lack of communication to senior management and physician leadership when capacity and staffing situations were occurring. Strategies were proposed to address the issues. Phone huddles with leadership from all locations are held daily to discuss staffing, patient scheduling and concerns. A tool was developed to assist with decision making related to staffing and patient scheduling. A “One Team” approach was implemented for staffing with the expectation that staff would float to cover staffing needs at the other locations. Processes were standardized across all units to ensure staff feel competent when floating. Results: Several positive outcomes have been noted since changes were implemented 10 months ago. Staff are more willing to float and have bought into the “One Team” concept. Cross coverage of staffing vacancies occurs daily, allowing for better and more cost effective utilization of staff across locations. Decisions to block schedules are made by managers using the developed tool. There is improved awareness of critical staffing and capacity issues by senior leadership and physician leaders. Conclusions: Implementing a One Team staffing approach to cover three infusion center locations increases staff productivity and allows for fluctuations in patient volumes.

Development of Schedule Programming Assistant for Day Classes (SPADay) Version 1.0: Course Timetabling in Excel

Timetabling of class-faculty schedules is complex and lengthy wherein universities assign significant workforce and material resources each semester. Manual scheduling produces conflict schedules of class-faculty and room utilizations that in many instances are determined only when classes have already started. Timetabling problems in CTU are concerned with many students but limited organic faculty members. The objectives of this study were to automate: 1) consolidation of the tabulated schedules from the different departments and colleges; 2) detection of conflict faculty schedules; and 3) pictographic plotting of class-faculty schedules and room utilizations according to the formats adopted by the university with calculated number of contact hours and preparations. The method adapts Visual Basic for Applications programming in Microsoft Excel. From the data of block schedules provided by different departments or colleges, conflict schedules are detected and modified by users. Once harmonized, plotting pictographically class-faculty schedules into program by teacher, program by section, and room utilization are automated. SPADay leads to immediate detection of conflict schedules of faculty members, checking of inconsistent information were implemented, speedy printing of outputs into different formats, and generation of class-faculty schedules database that can be adopted with minor revisions and fine-tuning of such schedules for proceeding semesters.

Connecting Research to Teaching: Block Scheduling and High School Mathematics Instruction

Block scheduling is not a new phenomenon. It has been widely used in British Columbia, Ontario, and Alberta since the 1970s. In the United States, block schedules have become increasingly popular throughout the 1990s, and currently they are spreading to high schools in many regions.