How do staff shifts work in Nightingale?

This article describes how to use the staff shifts feature for groups and SIL Houses.

Feature Setting

Access to staff shifts is OFF by default, to enable it you need to contact Nightingale Support.

Creating/Managing Shifts

For staff requiring access you will need to enable a new “Group Staff Shifts (Manage)“ access setting under the groups tab in Position Permissions:

On a group’s dashboard calendar, you’ll now see a “Manage Staff Shifts” dropdown in the upper-right:

Under it you’ll see “Bulk Management” and “Individual Management”:

Individual Management

“Individual Management” brings up this popup:

Tabs on the left allow you to add a new shift or edit/archive/unarchive an existing shift.

The table on the right shows you shifts during a given date range (defaults to the date range currently visible on the calendar but can be changed after the popup is opened) along with buttons for cloning it (prefills and opens the Add tab) or editing it (prefills and selects the Edit tab)

Overnight shifts are supported and occur if the end time is before the start time or equal to the start time (in which case it is a full day shift)

Duplicate Shifts

If you do not check “allow duplicate shifts”, attempting to save will be interrupted if there is an existing active shift with the exact same date and times as the one you are attempting to save, and an error message will be shown to this effect:

Bulk Management

“Bulk Management” brings up a similar popup, however this can be used for creating/reassigning/archiving shifts in bulk rather than individually:

Note that recurrences CANNOT be edited, because they are more like records of previous patterns you used to create shifts in bulk. This is why the rightmost column says “Prefills” instead of “Actions”.

This also means that if some shifts are changed from the pattern that created them (e.g. the pattern created morning shifts, one of those shifts was moved to the evening), then the prefills for reassigning or archiving will no longer catch those shifts.

Because of this, the “# of Shifts” column lets the user know how many shifts from this recurrence have been changed since it was created; these shifts might not be affected by prefilled reassigning or archiving

Also, recurrences which have had all their shifts archived will not be shown.

For the reassign and archive tabs, at the moment they will only reassign/archive shifts with the exact staff members you specify, no more, no less:

Viewing/Attending Shifts on the Website

Shifts are visible on the yellow appointments on the calendars of the group they belong to and the staff assigned to them, there is also a “Hide Staff Shifts” button on the group calendar:

Most context menu items are disabled on appointments from staff shifts except for:

The “Show Shift Details” item which will show which appointments are part of the shift and currently displays a simple text popup like so:

The “Reassign Staff” option has special functionality to change the shift’s staff members if it isn’t already attended.

The “Attend Shift” will mark the shift as Attended.

Staff shifts are also visible as appointments on the manage attendance page, with the group shown in place of the client:

Attending a staff shift will automatically attend any other appointments that match the following criteria:

• Are rostered to the same group as the staff shift

• Have some overlap with the staff shift’s time period

• Are unassigned

• Are not already attended (this means that if you select the wrong attendance status for a shift, you need to manually correct the attendance status of any affected appointments)

Hitting the pencil icon will show a list of these appointments in the Group Roster Clients tab (note that group appointments included in a staff shift will be broken down into individual client appointments):

For example, when the shift highlighted in red was attended, one appointment (green) was automatically attended because it met the above criteria, but the other (grey) was already assigned to a staff member and so was not attended:

Manage Attendance Travel for Staff Shifts/Group Rosters

The travel section of both the pencil menu and the bulk action menu (when selecting one appointment) shows more info related to group appointments or staff shifts, firstly if you try to set travel on the group container appointment (which would be useless because it doesn’t flow through to either timesheets or billing), you’ll get this message:

Pencil menu:

Example bulk action menu with one appointment checked:

When setting travel for a non-group or individual client/staff appointment, there’s a new field for the travelling staff:

• For normal 1:1 appointments this field will only have the rostered member, meaning filling out other transport fields proceeds as normal and this field is purely for info.

• For individual group clients appointments with staff assigned (such as the one in the screenshot above), this lets you specify how much travel was done by each staff in the group for this individual client/attendance, and when auto attendance travel is run, it will combine all the kms/mins under all the travelling staff into a single travel charge.

• For individual group staff appointments, it will only show the individual staff member we are setting travel for which will flow through to timesheets/payroll. So, for a 1:1 appointment this field is purely for info.

• For client appointments under one or more staff shifts, it currently does NOT show the staff in those staff shifts UNLESS they have already recorded travel data via the app, in which case it DOES allow you to go back and edit the data they entered.

• It is currently the user's responsibility to ensure any manual travel data entries/edits done through this interface are correct, meaning if the user adjusts travel kms for a client’s group appointment travel charge and wants that adjustment to flow through to the travelling staff’s timesheet, they need to manually adjust the travelling staff’s travel record for that group appointment (which, as noted above, is currently separate from the client’s travel records for group appointments)

Travel

Travel kms columns in manage attendance, review attendance, and reports that can show client attendances should sum up most of the travel fields for client attendances with travel from multiple staff members, except for the odometer and travel notes fields (columns for odometer and travel notes fields will show text showing what the value was entered for each staff).

For example, going from the above screenshot, if we enter:

• 1 km to client, 2km odometer start, and “Bob’s Travel” travel notes under staff Bob Mobman

• 10 km to client, 20km odometer start, and “Cob’s Travel” travel notes under staff Cob Mobman

• nothing under staff Nightingale Admin

Manage attendance, review attendance etc. should show the following in their travel columns:

• 11km to client (1 + 10)

• “Bob Mobman: 2km | Cob Mobman: 20km“ odometer start

• “Bob Mobman: Bob’s Travel | Cob Mobman: Cob’s Travel” travel notes

Viewing/Attending Shifts on the App

Staff Shifts can be managed from the Staff App in the same location as regular one-to-one appointments.

To view a staff shift in the Staff App, log in to the app and navigate to the upcoming appointments page. A Staff Shift can be identified by the “(Staff Shift)”.

After clicking on the Staff Shift page, the app will open a page for the shift. This page is very similar to the regular appointment page with some key differences.

The three differences you should take note of are:

• The Participants section, which contains a card for each of the clients you will be interacting with during the shift. Pressing on any of these cards will open a new page containing all the relevant information about the client.

• The Appointments section, where there will be a separate box for each appointment within the shift. Each box contains the start time and end time of the appointment, a list of clients in the appointment, a button for managing travel, and a button for updating the attendance.

To start work in a staff shift, you can simply press the start work button.

Please note that pressing the “Start Work” button will automatically set the attendance for every client in the appointment to “Attended”.

If one of your clients is unable to make the appointment, or if you need to enter any attendance other than 'Attended” you can manually change the attendance by pressing next to the relevant client. once you are happy with your selections you can press the “Start Work” button and the attendances you have entered will be saved (any attendances you have left unselected will still automatically be set to “Attended”).

If at any time you want to change the attendances, you have selected you can change your selections by choosing a new value and pressing the “Update” button. This will only update the attendance status of the relevant appointment.