Building a duty roster for a 16-nurse unit with Patika
This guide is one of the most-read posts on the Patika blog. Below we walk through a 16-person nursing team with different weekday and weekend coverage needs—from staff setup to schedule generation, plus Data Validation, shift analysis, and other current capabilities.
Before you start: staff list and unit
Everything assumes your nurses exist in the system. On the Staff page you can add team members, reorder them with drag-and-drop, and enable advanced columns for class or per-staff overtime limits (hours) as needed. If you run multiple units, make sure the correct unit is selected; in multi-unit mode each unit keeps its own roster and schedules.
Step 1: Configure shift settings
Open Schedule from the left menu. This page holds both your shift configuration and the generated schedule; the settings area is labeled Shift Settings.
Use Guided Mode to move through options with explanations, or switch to Advanced Mode for tab-based editing (Shifts, Working Days, Rules, etc.) when you are comfortable. Settings are stored the same way in either mode.
Our example daily requirements:
- Weekdays (Monday–Friday): 4 nurses on 24-hour duty, 3 on 8-hour day shifts — 7 people per day.
- Weekends (Saturday–Sunday): 3 on 24-hour duty, 2 on 8-hour day shifts — 5 people per day.
Under Shifts, enter weekday and weekend counts for 24h and 8h slots. Use Working Days to define which days count as workdays, and mark weekend-equivalent holidays so slot logic matches public holidays. Under Rules, reflect your policies—rest between shifts, overtime caps, weekend fairness, shift-type fairness—so the plan stays compliant and perceived as fair.
Save the configuration for your chosen month and unit.
Step 2: Gather and clarify requests
Respecting personal time improves morale. On the Requests page (calendar view) you can manage:
- Annual leave
- Off-day requests when someone must not work
- Work-day requests when someone prefers to work
- Where needed, date-specific excluded shift hours (avoid certain shift lengths on certain dates)
Share a Staff Access Code so nurses can submit requests from their phones; you review and approve from the same screen. That beats long chat threads and lost messages.
Step 3: Special constraints on staff
If certain pairs should not share a shift, use Exclusion Pairs on the Staff page so the solver never places both in the same slot on the same day.
For part-time nurses, class (experience tier), per-person overtime hour caps, or “Only on requested days” working mode, set these on the Staff screen so targets and fairness rules apply correctly.
Step 4: Run Data Validation (before generating)
When configuration and requests are ready, use the Data Validation button. It surfaces issues before generation—e.g. someone who cannot take any shift type (all lengths excluded), work-day demand exceeding slots on a date, or a nurse in “requested days only” mode with no requests that month. Results split into errors (fix recommended) and warnings (good to know). You can still click Generate Schedule, but resolving warnings usually yields cleaner rosters. For more detail, see the Data Validation article.
Step 5: Generate, save, analyze, and share
Generate Schedule asks Patika to fill quotas, respect legal and custom rules, and spread shifts as fairly as possible across the team. Requests are usually satisfied; when many work-day requests collide or constraints are very tight, not every preference may be feasible—Data Validation warnings help you see that early.
Review the draft and adjust with drag-and-drop if needed. Save Schedule Plan to persist it. Use Download Excel for WhatsApp or email distribution. Use Shift Analysis and summary views to verify weekend balance, shift-type distribution, and other metrics so the roster is defensible to the team.
Recap: Staff & unit → Schedule settings (guided or advanced) → Requests → optional Staff constraints → Data Validation → Generate Schedule → save, analyze, Excel. What used to be hours in spreadsheets becomes a repeatable flow and a short quality check.