A 24/7 shift template that proves the coverage instead of claiming it

A 24/7 shift schedule is one where every hour of every day has somebody rostered onto it, including the hours nobody wants: three in the morning, Christmas Day, and the Sunday of a long weekend.

The phrase describes a requirement rather than a pattern, which is why searching for it returns so much noise. A hospital, a care home and a data centre all run 24/7 and none of them run the same roster. What they share is the constraint: the unit cannot close, so the question is never whether the hours get covered but who covers them and at what cost to the people doing it.

The arithmetic is unforgiving and it is the whole story. A week has 168 hours. If one person must be present at all times, that is 168 person-hours a week for a single post, and a full-time employee gives you about 37 to 42 of them. So a single continuously-covered post needs four people, not three, and the fourth is not slack — she is the reason the other three get days off, take holiday, and are allowed to be ill. Facilities that staff a 24/7 post with three people are not running lean; they are running a rota that only works while nobody's child gets chickenpox.

Four per post, and the number falls straight out of the arithmetic rather than out of anyone's preference: 168 hours a week divided by four teams is 42 hours each.

This is the calculation most worth doing before choosing a pattern, because it settles an argument people usually have much later and much more expensively. Take the number of hours the post must be covered, 168 for a genuine 24/7. Divide by the hours a person can sustainably work, call it 42 with some overtime in it. You get four. Add the second post and it is eight, and so on: every continuously-covered position costs you four heads, not three, and not 3.5 with agency filling the gap.

The pattern you pick after that changes almost nothing about the total and almost everything about how it feels. Three 8-hour shifts and four teams is 42 hours a week each. Two 12-hour shifts and four teams is also 42 hours a week each. The hours are identical; what differs is whether people work more days for shorter stretches or fewer days for longer ones, and whether the nights are shared out or concentrated onto the same faces forever.

Which is why the honest version of 'how many staff do I need' is a second question: how many do you need before the rota survives one person being ill? If the answer to the first is four and you have four, you do not have a 24/7 rota. You have a 24/7 rota and a plan to ring people on their day off.

A four-team, 28-day rotation of three 8-hour shifts: seven days, two off, seven swings, two off, seven nights, three off. Every team rotates forward through all three shifts and averages 42 hours a week.

It is the pattern this template generates, and it is the natural answer for a unit that has decided against 12-hour shifts. Three shifts meet end to end — days 07:00 to 15:00, swings 15:00 to 23:00, nights 23:00 to 07:00 — so the 24 hours close exactly, with a handover at each seam rather than a gap.

The rotation runs forward: days, then swings, then nights. That direction matters more than it sounds. A body adjusts to a later bedtime more easily than an earlier one, which is the same reason flying west is kinder than flying east, so rotating forward through the shifts asks less of people than rotating backward through them. It is a free improvement and a surprising number of rotas get it the wrong way round.

It can prove the pattern covers every hour. It cannot prove the people in it are allowed to work those hours.

The shifts-per-day formula is a real check and it keeps working as you edit, which is more than a static grid will do. But it is checking the shape of the rota, not the legality of the roster. It cannot know that the nurse you dropped into Tuesday's night has a licence expiring on Monday. It cannot enforce the rest gap between a nine-hour night and the swing somebody is on the next afternoon. It cannot notice that rotating a team forward through seven nights has pushed one person past a consecutive-days limit her contract sets. And when you re-key it into whatever runs your payroll, the nine-hour night will quietly become eight again, because eight is what everyone expects to see.

MedAligna computes every duration on real elapsed time for the same reason this file does, and then does the part a spreadsheet cannot: the rest rule, the credential check and the payroll export all read the same figure, so the night that ran nine hours reaches payroll as nine, and the person whose licence lapses on Monday cannot be put on Tuesday at all.