Author Affiliations: Department of Nursing Science (Ms Tuominen and Drs Lundgren-Laine and Salanterä) and Biostatistics Department (Mr Teperi) University of Turku; Department of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine (Ms Tuominen) and Development Unit (Dr Salanterä), Turku University Hospital; and Central Finland Health Care District, Jyväskylä (Dr Lundgren-Laine), Finland.
The aim of this study was to identify nurse managers' daily tasks during the rescheduling of sudden nursing staff absences by comparing two techniques: a paper-based system as phone calls and emails or information technology-based staffing systems. In addition, it is intended to evaluate the usability of information technology-based staffing solutions and evaluate estimated cost savings by using hospital permanent staff to cover sudden absences. A quasi-experimental pretest and posttest one-group study design was used to evaluate nurse managers' (n = 61) daily tasks (n = 5800) during rescheduling nursing staff sudden absences (n = 2628); furthermore, we engaged in observations and provided estimates of cost savings generated by our proposed intervention. The number of nurse manager tasks during rescheduling decreased significantly (P