Staff Planning in Healthcare at Christmas | Workforce Management

The Christmas season combines holidays, long weekends, and personal expectations for leisure time with the typical additional challenges of the cold season, increased respiratory infections, and a higher number of emergencies.

In care facilities and hospitals, security of supply is imperative. Staff shortages have a direct impact on patient safety, quality of care, and workload. At the same time, incorrect or short-term planning exacerbates stress and fluctuation within the team.

Studies show that poor staffing, insufficient personnel, and shift scheduling with a higher error rate correlate with burnout in the team and poor patient outcomes. International overviews (e.g., WHO strategies for health workforce management, OECD reports on the staffing situation) emphasize the importance of strategic staff planning for the quality of care.

Contents:

↓ Why is Shift Scheduling Particularly Challenging in the Healthcare Sector during Holiday Season?
↓ Christmas in Nursing: Who Works When?
↓ Legal Provisions that Planners must Observe During the Holiday Season
↓ How can Workforce Management Modules Provide Precise Support?

 

 

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Why is Shift Scheduling Particularly Challenging in the Healthcare Sector during Holiday Season?

This is simple to be answered, because multiple stressors occur at once: holidays and changing shift needs, seasonal peaks, for example infection waves, increased vacation and preferred shift requests from staff, strict legal rules on working and rest times, and last-minute absences. All of this must be reconciled with limited staffing, varying qualifications across wards, and the need for fair, transparent shift allocation, under intense time pressure and with little room for error.

With data driven planning, automatic optimization, and transparent self-service features, complex holiday staffing becomes predictable and manageable, ensuring reliable care and reducing stress for both staff and managers.

Behind the scenes, an AI supported engine optimizes the schedules. It automatically calculates who is needed and when, considering qualifications, preferences, work models, and legal requirements. If someone calls in sick or additional shifts are required at short notice, a digital workforce management tool can suggest suitable replacements within minutes, so managers do not have to rely on manual processes or chaotic workflows. Employees can view shifts, swap them, or report absences through the portal; planning becomes more transparent and participatory, which boosts satisfaction. Detailed reporting, for example on overtime, particularly stressful shifts, or when extra capacity may be needed, is also easy to produce.
Especially during the holiday season, when public holidays increased demand, and personal expectations collide, a workforce management software provides all the building blocks for scheduling that balances care continuity and employee well-being. What could be chaos becomes a structured, controllable, and humane challenge.

 

 

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Christmas in Nursing: Who Works When?

In healthcare the question of how to organize shifts around Christmas comes up anew every year. While for many employees December 25 and 26 are often legally recognized holidays and therefore automatically days off from work, that is not the case in the care sector.

Hospitals, residential care facilities and outpatient services are so called facilities for providing services to the public that are allowed to work on Sundays and public holidays (e.g. Section 10 of the Working Hours Act of Germany) because continuous patient care is necessary.

According to German law, anyone working on a public holiday such as December 25 or 26 is entitled to a compensatory day off within eight weeks according to Section 11 paragraph 3 of the Working Hours Act. This compensatory day protects against overload and ensures that employees who work on holidays still get sufficient recovery time. Many employers also make additional rules, often in works agreements or collective agreements – holiday pay that goes beyond the law and is compensated either financially or with extra time off.

In Germany, Christmas Eve (December 24) and New Year’s Eve (December 31) are not public holidays. From a labor law perspective, they count as regular weekdays. Nevertheless, many care facilities commonly introduce shortened shifts, implement on-call holiday coverage from a certain time, or cover these days with vacation, time off in lieu, or preferred shift schedules. There is no statutory right to time off or reduced working hours for these days. Such arrangements are usually based on company agreements, collective bargaining rules, or collegial fairness in scheduling.

Fairness in scheduling is especially important at Christmas. Many teams use rotation systems, so the same people do not have to work on holidays every year. Social factors, such as employees with young children or those without family obligations, are often considered as well. Ultimately, however, the decisive factor like ensuring care for those in need takes priority, and that demands a high degree of flexibility from all staff remains.

 

 

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Legal Provisions that Planners must Observe During the Holiday Season

Even if Christmas Season is a hectic time, labor law remains labor law. Minimum rest periods, maximum working hours, bonuses for night and holiday work, documentation requirements, and work council participation rights – all of this must be considered and correctly documented.

Particularly valuable: WFM systems automatically check these requirements and prevent violations before they happen.

 

Early needs analysis:

The Holiday season places special demands on staff planning, but Workforce Management software can make the process efficient. The first step is an early needs analysis: forecasting features calculate staffing requirements by day and shift, while scenarios like sickness absences, public holidays, or increased patient numbers are factored in ahead of time.

Centralized vacation planning:

Vacation planning should be managed centrally at the same time. All requests are submitted through an employee portal, so shortages can be identified and balanced out in advance.

Store and check compliance rules:

Compliance with regulations is equally important. Working hours, rest periods, bonuses, and holiday regulations are stored in the software and checked for possible conflicts through test runs.

Define a pool of temporary workers:

A flexible pool of temporary workers ensures that short-term absences can be quickly compensated. In this case availability, skills, and working hours are recorded so that the software automatically suggests suitable replacements.

Create a communication plan:

Transparent communication is crucial: Shift schedules should be published in good time, and changes or swap options should be clearly communicated.

Activate reporting and monitoring:

During the Holiday season, dashboards and reporting tools help to keep track of absences, utilization, and bottlenecks so that planners can react early.

Follow-up & lessons learned:

After the Christmas season, it is worth doing a careful follow-up: Shift schedule results and any bottlenecks that occur are analyzed so that the findings can be used for planning next year and to continuously improve the process.

 

 

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How can Workforce Management Software Support?

In the healthcare sector in particular, scheduling staff for Christmas is a major challenge. Questions like “Who absolutely must work?”, “Who is eligable to take time off?” and “How can substitute days off be distributed correctly?” are part of the daily planning routine.

Forecast / Demand planning

Imagine if software could look back at past data, recognize patterns, compare waves of infection, and then predict when a team will be particularly needed during Christmas Season. That’s exactly what happens here. Demand planning not only shows critical days but also helps you decide early on whether you need additional staff or temporary help.

Automatic shift scheduling/rostering

Here, the software takes on the most complex Holiday Season challenge: fair shift distribution. Without arguments, without chance, but with rules, qualifications, and preferences in mind.

Advantage: If someone drops out during the busy period, the system calculates alternatives, including rest periods, in seconds.

Integrated time management (working hours law, collective agreements, rest periods)

The Christmas season is full of surprises, but rule violations should not be one of them. Integrated time management checks legal requirements and collective agreement provisions in real time and rings the alarm before mistakes happen.

Absence and vacation management

When everyone wants to take holiday leave and no one wants to take on shifts, chaos ensues. Workforce Management software bundles all requests, identifies conflicts, and prevents double bookings.

Pooling

Flexibility is worth its weight in gold during Holiday Season. A digital solution that takes flexible personnel pools into account for personnel planning ensures that available and qualified staff end up exactly where they are needed. This avoids time-consuming telephone chains.

Time recording

Holiday bonuses, overtime, and compensatory days quickly become a science in themselves during Christmas Season. Automatic time tracking ensures that no one misses out and that the payroll is correct.

Self-service & employee app

Explaining schedule changes 10 times a day? No, thank you. An app ensures transparency and participation, as employees can submit requests, swap shifts, and provide feedback, all digitally. Requested days off are automatically considered when generating schedules.

Analytics & reporting

If you want to understand, you have to measure. Dashboards show absences, costs, rest period violations, and even “what-if” scenarios.

This is exactly where plano WFM comes into play. As modern, data- and AI-supported workforce management software, it enables accuirate planning and managing staff during the Holiday season. plano WFM not only follows traditional shift schedules but also gets employees on board: with self-service portals (myplano), transparent processes, and fair shift distribution. The software offers integrated time management, time recording, and skill management, and allows you to determine the right staffing requirements for each station, shift, and qualification class, considering historical data and seasonal fluctuations. This allows you to create schedules that comply with legal requirements and are tailored to individual wishes and real-world requirements.

Are you interested in workforce management in healthcare? Then read our blog on the topic: Hospital Shift Schedule – The Importance of Digital Shift Scheduling and Its Success Factors!

 

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