Search for nurse scheduling software and most of what comes up wants a signup and a credit card before it shows you anything. This one doesn’t, and it’s built for the part of nurse rostering that actually breaks ordinary scheduling tools: a ward runs 24 hours a day, so the rest rule, the consecutive-nights cap, and the no-day-after-a-night rule all have to reach across midnight — a boundary a day-by-day template has no way to see at all.
Coverage was never the hard part
Any spreadsheet can tell you that a ward needs three RNs on days and two on nights. The hard part is everything the coverage number doesn’t say: the same nurse can’t finish a night shift at 07:00 and start a day shift at 07:00 the same morning, can’t work six nights in a row, and shouldn’t end up with every second weekend while the nurse next to her gets none. Those are cross-day rules, and a scheduling tool that only looks at one day at a time has nothing to say about any of them — which is exactly the gap that made the four rotation posts I published in July point at a tool that could not actually build an overnight schedule. This one is built specifically to close that gap, and it has been tested against it: solo-nurse fixtures that isolate the rest rule from the day-after-night rule from the hours cap, one at a time, to make sure each is doing its own job and not silently leaning on another.
What the sample ward actually models
The sample loaded on the tool is a 28-day inpatient ward: ten RNs, six aides, two 12-hour shifts, and three separate coverage streams — RN headcount, aide headcount, and a charge nurse who has to be one of the RNs on shift, not an extra body. That last one is a concurrent demand: it’s satisfied by someone already counted toward RN coverage, which is how a charge-nurse requirement actually works on a real ward. Weekend nights run one RN lighter than weekdays, and hitting solve returns a four-week rota with minimum rest, the consecutive-nights cap, and the no-day-after-a-night rule all enforced as hard constraints — not suggestions the solver can trade away for a cheaper roster.
Two numbers are worth watching in the result. The charge-nurse stream carries a much steeper shortage penalty than the aide stream, which is how you tell the model an unstaffed charge shift is a different order of problem than a missing aide — you set those numbers, and they’re what the solver weighs against labour cost. And the results page reports continuity: how many separate blocks of consecutive days each nurse works, how long the blocks run, and how many are lone single days. A roster can hit 100% coverage and still be the kind people quit over, and the block numbers are where that shows up before your staff feel it.
The chart above is that effect measured on this exact ward. Turning on the clustering penalty took single-shift blocks from 74 down to 14 and day/night switches from 23 down to 11, with coverage and total labour cost unchanged — the solver was indifferent between a scattered roster and a clustered one on cost alone, so nothing but that one penalty decided which one you get.
Elastic minimums instead of a dead end
Stack a rest rule, a consecutive-nights cap, and a contracted-hours minimum on top of a thin roster and it’s easy to make a schedule that is mathematically impossible — and an honest “infeasible” error tells a nurse manager nothing she can act on. This engine treats shortages and shortfalls as elastic instead: falling short is allowed, but it costs, and it shows up as a named line — a specific unfilled charge-nurse shift, a specific nurse under her weekly minimum — rather than a wall. You get a schedule and a to-do list, never nothing.
Not every unit needs this page
Outpatient settings — clinics, dialysis, dental, urgent care — usually don’t need cross-midnight rules at all, because nothing runs overnight and demand just rises and falls through the working day. My free healthcare staff scheduling software post covers that case with a half-hour slot model built for exactly that shape of problem, including a triage rotation and front-desk coverage — it targets a genuinely different scheduling problem from inpatient nurse rostering, which is why it’s a separate tool and a separate post rather than the same page. Long-term care is different again, closer to a ratio problem than an acuity problem, and has its own page.
Nurse rostering questions
Does it handle shift requests or self-scheduling? Partly. A cell in a nurse’s availability grid can be blank (unavailable), open, or locked to a specific shift, so requests you’ve already agreed to get pinned before solving and the model builds the rest of the rota around them. There’s no request-bidding workflow — you decide what’s granted, the solver handles the rest.
Is the 11-hour rest rule required in the US? No — that default is the EU Working Time Directive figure. There’s no federal US equivalent, and state rules for healthcare shift work vary and are often shorter. The minimum-rest parameter is a field you set to match your own state law, union contract, or unit policy, not a constant baked into the model. The CDC/NIOSH guide to shift work is a reasonable starting point if your unit doesn’t have a formal policy yet.
Can it guarantee a charge nurse on every shift? Yes — that’s what a concurrent demand is for. Charge nurse is modeled as a role one of your on-shift RNs fills, not a separate headcount line.
Why does it say “feasible” instead of “optimal”? Because the solver hit its time budget before it could prove no cheaper roster exists. The roster you got is valid and every hard rule holds — it just isn’t certified as the lowest-cost one. Raising the time limit lets it keep looking.
Can I export it to Excel? Yes — a nurse-by-day pivot, the full assignment detail, any unfilled shifts, and the continuity numbers, all in one workbook you can hand to a manager who never opens the tool itself.
The same engine that builds a hospital ward rota also runs the site’s other 24/7 pages — a generic version for any round-the-clock team, plus dedicated pages for firefighters, police, and correctional staff, if nursing isn’t your shift-work problem.
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