Rescheduling nursing staff with information technologybased staffing solutions: a scoping review

Abstract

Rescheduling to cover the sudden absences of nursing staff members is a time-consuming part of a nurse manager's daily work. The use of information technology-based (IT-based) staffing solutions is a potential solution to this issue. In order to address this challenge and improve the rescheduling process, this scoping review was created to identify, describe and analyse published papers focused on nursing staff rescheduling. The papers were analysed from the perspectives of nursing staff, patient care and organisational outcomes in hospital settings. The results showed that using IT-based staffing solutions for rescheduling can reduce both organisations' staffing costs and nurse managers' work tasks. Patient care consequences related to such solutions were not described in the reviewed papers. However, floating may also have an impact on the quality of patient care due to the mixing of nursing staff members' professional roles and skills. There is also a need for additional information about the usability of IT-based staffing solutions.