Scenario: A Hospital with Two Units
You are managing two different units in a public hospital: Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and Emergency Department (ED). The ICU has 12 nurses and the ED has 18 nurses. Each unit has different shift requirements, staff competency levels, and rules. In this guide, we explain how to professionally manage both units from a single account using Patika's advanced features.
Step 1: Creating Units
With Patika's Multi-Unit Management feature, you can manage each department independently. Each unit has its own staff list, shift plans, settings, and requests.
How to Do It?
- Go to the Staff page.
- Click the New Unit button next to the unit selection area.
- Enter "Intensive Care" as the name for the first unit and click Create.
- Repeat the same process for "Emergency Department".
Now you can switch between units using the dropdown menu at the top of the page. Staff added to one unit or settings configured there will not affect the other unit; everything is completely independent.
Tip: You can create separate Staff Access Codes for each unit. ICU nurses can enter their requests with the code "ICU2026", while ED nurses can use "ED2026".
Step 2: Setting Up Staff Classes
In critical units like the ICU, it is vital to have an experienced nurse in every shift. You can guarantee this with Patika's Staff Classes feature.
Class System:
- Class 1: Junior nurses (0-2 years experience)
- Class 2: Mid-level nurses (2-5 years experience)
- Class 3: Senior nurses (5+ years experience)
How to Do It?
- On the Staff page, activate the "Do you want to use staff classes?" option in the Table Column Settings section.
- Enter the appropriate value (1-10) for each nurse in the Class column that appears in the table.
Class Requirements in Shift Settings:
In the Shift Settings page, you can set minimum class requirements for each shift type. For example, for the ICU unit:
- 24-hour on-call: Class 3 → 1 (At least one senior nurse per on-call shift)
- 8-hour day shift: Class 2 → 1 (At least one mid-level nurse per day shift)
This way, the system automatically guarantees experience level distribution when creating the shift plan.
Step 3: Configuring Fairness Rules
Fair shift distribution is the foundation of staff satisfaction. Patika offers three powerful rules for this:
Weekend Fairness
When you enable this rule, the system ensures all staff work an equal number of weekends. For example, if the ED has 18 nurses and 8 weekend days per month, the system distributes weekends as equally as possible. If you set the Maximum Weekend Difference to 1, the difference between the nurse who works the most and least weekends will be at most 1 day.
Shift Type Fairness
In units with both 24-hour on-call and 8-hour day shifts, some nurses may always get on-call duty while others always work day shifts. By enabling the Shift Type Fairness rule, you ensure each nurse works different shift types equally.
Maximum Consecutive Weekends
You can limit how many consecutive weekends a nurse can work. For example, if you set this to 2, no nurse will work 3 weekends in a row. This rule prevents fatigue and balances the weekend workload.
How to Do It? Enable the relevant rules on the Shift Settings page and adjust the values according to your institution's needs.
Step 4: Configuring Rest Rules
In units like ICU and ED, staff fatigue directly affects patient safety. Patika's NBN Transition Penalty rule solves this problem.
What is NBN Transition Penalty?
It is a rule that prevents the "On-Call → Off → Work" pattern. This means a nurse cannot rest for only 1 day after a 24-hour on-call shift and then start working again the next day. Instead, the system encourages the "On-Call → Off → Off" pattern.
With this feature, the concept of alternating day work is eliminated, and nurses return to work well-rested after on-call duty.
How to Do It? Enable the "NBN Transition Penalty" rule on the Shift Settings page. If you keep the penalty coefficient high, the system will enforce this rule more strictly.
Step 5: Validation with Data Check
After configuring all settings, we strongly recommend using the Data Validation feature before generating the schedule. This feature performs three different consistency checks:
- Staff Cannot Be Assigned Any Shift (Error): Identifies staff who cannot be assigned to any shift due to excluded hours.
- Work Request Exceeds Capacity (Warning): Reports situations where the number of work requests on a specific day exceeds the number of shift slots.
- Request Mode Staff Has No Requests (Warning): Checks whether staff in "only work on requested days" mode have submitted any requests.
How to Do It? On the final step of the Shift Settings page, click the Data Validation button next to the "Generate Schedule" button. In the window that opens, errors are shown in red and warnings in yellow. If all checks pass, you'll see a green confirmation.
Step 6: Schedule Generation and Analysis
After data validation, click the Generate Schedule button to create the plan. The system produces an optimal plan considering all your rules and class requirements.
After the plan is ready, use Patika's Detailed Analysis and Reporting feature to review the results:
- Staff-Based Working Hours: See each nurse's total monthly working hours.
- Weekend Distribution: Check how fairly weekend work is distributed among staff.
- Shift Type Distribution: Review whether 24-hour and 8-hour shifts are distributed evenly.
- Overtime Statistics: Ensure legal limits are not exceeded.
Separate analysis for each unit: You can switch between "Intensive Care" and "Emergency Department" from the unit selection menu to review each unit's analysis independently.
Result: With multi-unit management, you can manage two different departments from a single account, completely independently. Staff classes guarantee experienced nurses in critical shifts, fairness rules ensure everyone works equally and fairly. Data validation and analysis features help you verify that your plan is error-free and balanced.