Shift work and childcare

[Lizmw]

So I'm expecting my first child

Both me and my partner work in the nhs and would like to stay full time if possible to keep the income we have at the moment.

How do others manage their hours when both parents work shift work?
We have long days 7am to 9pm or short days 7am to 3pm and 1pm to 9pm.

Any information would be very useful.

Fellow nhs shift worker and I've found that when both people are shift workers and working full time they do opposite shifts for childcare. (Normally they do 3 long days each with one day off together).
It's tough I don't know how they do it.
I work shifts covering a 24 hour device (just increased from 24 to 30 hours due to living costs) and if my husband didn't work Monday to Friday with flexible start and finish times and able to work from home I don't know how we would cope. We have maximum x2 days per week need childcare for between the hours of 8-3.
What shifts do you do a week? What shifts does your partner do??

So we don't have set shifts yet but out work does offer flexible working to enable set shifts per week.
At the moment we work 5 short shifts each.
I would love to have more than 1 day a week off together and if we did opposit shifts then it would mean that apart from that one day we wouldn't be eating dinner / watching TV/ spending any time together

Is there a nursery linked to the hospital? Where I work there is a private nursery which does a special discount for NHS Workers, it also was open early/late enough to work around shifts. It winds me up that most nursery’s have times that don’t work if you’re a shift worker!

Also you could try negotiating a fixed pattern of shifts to make it easier - depends on if your boss will approve it though.

In the end I had to drop some hours to enable me to do the nursery run every day, as my partner couldn’t get their shifts fixed (and as they earn more it made more sense for me to drop hours).

Could one of you do 5 short shifts and one of you do longer days??
Are you planning on nursery or family help with childcare for a couple of days?

Is it possible for you both to drop your hours slightly so could for example work 2 long days and one short each?