Workforce & Rostering — Roster Design
Children's Health Ireland now has an approved, deployment-ready roster for bringing three existing hospital services together under the new children's hospital operating model. This will become operational when the new children's hospital opens.
General Paediatrics rosters are currently managed manually across three hospitals that will combine in the new children's hospital. CHI needed a greenfield roster for a new operating model — one that could coordinate inpatient and on-call cover with outpatient commitments while distributing duties fairly across full-time and part-time clinicians.
Designed from the service model: mapped 23 shift types across Teams A, B, C and D and the Neurodisability team.
Designed with clinical leadership: used several design meetings to agree priorities, validate initial rosters and refine the rules and allocations in response to clinician feedback.
Built the individual rules: implemented more than 100 constraints covering WTE, team membership, availability, leave and clinic commitments.
Balanced competing priorities: optimised for WTE-adjusted fairness, an even spread of duties and preferred clinic days while protecting required service coverage.
Tested the operating rhythm: created a four-week rolling pattern and generated a complete 13-week roster with two weeks of leave assigned to each clinician.
MedModus produced one automatically generated roster covering 48 clinicians and the full range of inpatient, on-call and outpatient duties. The design protects unavailable days and provides a transparent basis for assessing allocation levels, clinic matching and the distribution of weekday and weekend work.
The roster has been approved for use when the new children's hospital opens. CHI is therefore prepared with a workable roster for the combined General Paediatrics service, avoiding the time and complexity of manually reconciling three legacy arrangements at the point of transition.
Where competing constraints prevented perfect equality within the first period, the allocation evidence identifies who should be prioritised in subsequent rosters.
“Bringing three separate General Paediatrics services together under one new hospital operating model was always going to be complex. MedModus worked with us to design a roster that respects the clinical reality of inpatient, on-call and outpatient commitments, while treating clinicians fairly across different working patterns. Having an automatically generated, deployment-ready roster before we open gives us confidence that the transition will be manageable.”
The approved roster brings inpatient, on-call and outpatient commitments into one view while preserving the underlying team structure.
Design requirements and demonstrated response
| Design requirement | Demonstrated response |
|---|---|
| Integrate three services | One roster spanning five teams and 23 inpatient, on-call and outpatient shift types. |
| Accommodate individual working patterns | More than 100 individual constraints implemented, including WTE and unavailable days. |
| Provide leave within the transition roster | Two weeks of leave assigned to every staff member in the 13-week period. |
| Support fair allocation | WTE-adjusted distributions measured by clinician, with future periods able to rebalance identified differences. |
| Protect outpatient activity | Preferred clinic days maximised where feasible within the higher-priority coverage and individual constraints. |
Key finding
CHI enters the new hospital transition with an approved roster design for a combined service that would be exceptionally difficult and time-consuming to reconcile manually.
What changed for the organisation once the platform was live.
Approved roster
ready for the new hospital opening
48 clinicians
covered by a single design
Three services combined
into one operating model
2 weeks leave
assigned to every clinician
We will walk you through how this engagement was delivered and what the equivalent first phase would look like for your organisation.
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