NHS E-rostering

[myBOYSareBONKERS]

My trust is implementing the MAPS rostering system.

Has any-one got any experience of this? Just wondering how it is going to affect me and my hours - positive and negatively!

any-one???

Oh dear - the only positives I've heard are from management. Stops arguing and is cheaper because it's very good at working out the skill mix for the cheapest option. It's not helpful to staff who want to work only particular shifts.

We use Roster-Pro, I'm not sure if they are very similar but I get on ok with it. You essentially select what you need with more points, then you can allocate fewer points for what would be nice but not essential. The 'must have' shifts are limited so that people don't take advantage, and you can see what other people have requested to see if what you want is feasible.

We did have teething problems, but as long as the person coordinating the off duty is sensible it's a good system, I usually get what I want but then I don't really make masses of requests.

Bump. My trust is also implementing it shortly. I've only heard about the negative aspects of it from colleagues I trained with who work in other trusts.

We have had MAPS for 6 months. Its shite. If you work full time you get 6 requests a month, part time pro-rata. However if you work a pattern so Saturdays, Sundays Mondays or tuesdays only for example, you get no requests, this worked fine when we self rota'd we could say do Mon/Tues and get a weekend off, now you have no ability to plan, you just know you will be working two of those 4 days but which ones only when rota is published.

The boffins ran the program and decided we had 10 staff too many, bye bye staff hello cost saving, oh hang on, we now have agency nurses most shifts as we are so short staffed, bye bye cost saving, hello staff of very mixed ability being paid 30 quid an hour (almost triple what I get)

The system from a management side ie swapping shifts etc is bloody slow and prone to crash at the drop of a hat.

I hate it sorry! The only positive is you can access the system from home, useful if you want to see what a pile of shit the computer has given you this month

RosterPro isn't that restrictive, I feel lucky now! Part timers get the same amount of requests as full timers and I can't remember how many requests we're allowed but it must be more than 4 because I manage, and they try really hard to honour the 'prefer' shifts too. Perhaps it depends on who is acting as administrator?

I'm another ex-MAPS survivor. dont use it now..it had its positives and negatives. If you search me in this topic you'll find lots of comments about it.

Thankyou everyone.

I am medically signed off unsocial hours but I can work any two day Tuesday to Friday.

therugratref - if i had the same system as you, would that mean i wouldnt be able to request any-thing at all?

the roster creator will have to manually upload your availability beforehand, this is then saved into the system. if you don't do unsocial hours does that mean you only ever do earlies or 9-5's? I suspect that because your shifts are so specific that they will have to manually allocate your working pattern before running the system to allocate all the shifts. This is the way we worked the programme, though we never got the auto-create to work properly so manually added all the shifts.

i've done the training so can probably answer most queries,

I work 8-6pm.

Where I work though we all do different start and finish times as that is what works best to keep the department covered 24/7 - however we have been told the computer can not handle that and we all have to work the same.

But this means the department wont be covered effectively

that's exactly the problem! do anything out of "traditional" shifts the computer won't cope. We had lively discussion after lively discussion with the MAPS team about the fact you can't just now demand everyone does what the computer says as there's the little thing called employment law, oh, then there's the flexible working requests.....you can get the picture.

this was our problem. in the end we manually entered in all the shifts and didn't use the auto-roster function.

tbh I wish we'd kept the system as it was the most accurate system for recording toil etc. (I use to up date it every monday with what was actually worked). The trust binned it when they came to the end of the free trial...despite the fact it was working; payroll was linked to it and paying correctly and all staff got their rosters for six weeks in advance.