Sixty Learners, One Room, Two Trainers
A hospital is rolling out a new sepsis protocol to 240 nurses across four campuses. The education team has two trainers, each available 20 hours per week, and a single simulation lab that can hold 12 nurses at a time. Each session takes 3 hours including setup and debrief, and the lab is booked for other departments every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. The go-live date is 10 weeks out, and the protocol becomes mandatory on that date. The training lead has drafted a plan that schedules two sessions per day, five days a week, and assumes all 240 nurses attend. A charge nurse points out that night-shift nurses cannot attend daytime sessions and that roughly 70 nurses work nights.
1. Test the draft plan's capacity assumption and determine whether the 10-week target is achievable as written.
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Start with available sessions. Two trainers at 20 hours each gives 40 trainer-hours per week; at 3 hours per session that is at most 13 sessions per week, but the lab is the binding constraint. The lab is unavailable Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, so those two half-days are lost. Assuming a five-day week with mornings and afternoons, that leaves roughly eight usable half-day slots, and the draft's two sessions per day yields about 10 sessions per week.
At 12 nurses per session, 10 sessions per week covers 120 nurse-seats weekly. Ten weeks gives 1,200 seats against a demand of 240 - apparently ample. But the draft assumes uniform attendance and ignores the night-shift cohort of 70, who cannot use daytime slots. Once night sessions are carved out, the effective daytime capacity and the lab's evening availability become the real constraints, and the single lab cannot serve both cohorts in the same slot. The arithmetic passes; the assumptions fail. The plan is not achievable as written because it never modeled the night-shift demand against lab availability.
2. Propose a revised scheduling approach and identify the two risks you would monitor most closely.
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Revise by segmenting demand before scheduling. Split the 240 into day-shift and night-shift cohorts, then build two parallel tracks: daytime sessions for day staff and a smaller number of evening or pre-shift sessions for the 70 night nurses, possibly using in-unit simulation rather than the central lab to relieve the bottleneck. Consider a train-the-trainer layer so charge nurses can deliver short in-unit refreshers, freeing the lab for high-fidelity scenarios only. Sequence by risk: units with the highest sepsis mortality go first, so partial coverage still protects the most vulnerable patients.
Monitor two risks. First, no-show rate: mandatory training with shift pressure typically loses 10–20 percent, so track attendance weekly against the plan and keep buffer sessions reserved. Second, lab contention: other departments will reclaim slots, so track actual versus planned lab hours and have a fallback in-unit option ready. Both are leading indicators - they move before the go-live date, which is when intervention is still possible.