Nurse Staffing Budgets: Census, Workload, Hours per Patient Day & FTEs

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Read two weeks of a ward's midnight census: average daily census, occupancy, the core census at the 80th percentile that the standard roster is built for, and the nights that still need extra staff.
• Turn the number of patients at each workload level into care hours per day, a workload index, the staff needed on the day and night shifts, and the hours a simple per-patient estimate misses.
• Compare six months of nursing hours with the patient days: pooled HPPD, earned hours at the target, the monthly variance in hours and in FTEs, and the average FTE variance over the half year.
• Build Ward 6's FTE budget: productive hours per FTE after leave, holidays, sickness and training, the replacement factor, the registered-nurse FTEs for next year's forecast and the total budget including fixed posts.
• Build a staffing grid for census 12 to 28: registered nurses and care assistants per shift from patient-per-staff ratios with minimums, tonight's number by lookup, and the hours per patient day the grid itself produces.
• Check a one-week roster of eight registered nurses and four care assistants: the RN gap on each day shift, the skill mix against the target, whether every night has a nurse who can lead the shift, and a highlight for every short day.
• Price an hour of overtime, bank and agency cover, let a formula name the cheapest, fill six weeks of shortfall hours in the order bank → overtime → agency, cost each week and report the agency share of the gap hours.
• Flex Ward 6's nursing budget to the actual patient days and split each month's overspend into a volume, an hours (efficiency) and a rate variance, then chart the static budget against the actual cost.