Labor and Delivery Unit Cuts Scheduling Time in Half with SignUpGenius

In a high-risk labor and delivery unit, the schedule is not just an administrative document. It determines which nurses are on the floor, which shifts are covered, and ultimately what kind of care patients receive on the most consequential days of their lives.

At the Women's Care Center at University of Colorado Hospital, that schedule was the sole responsibility of one person and it was taking her 12 hours every time.

The Organization

The Women's Care Center is the labor and delivery unit of University of Colorado Hospital, part of the UCHealth system on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. It is one of the most specialized obstetric programs in the region, specifically dedicated to high-risk labor and delivery and serving as a national referral center for patients with complex pregnancies.

The unit handles a scope of care that most hospitals do not. Its Level III NICU routinely cares for infants born at 22 weeks gestation and later, and the team includes certified nurse midwives, obstetricians, and maternal fetal medicine specialists. The unit has been recognized by the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology as a Center of Excellence for obstetric anesthesia care.

The nursing staff that makes all of this possible operates within a health system that takes nursing standards seriously. University of Colorado Hospital has earned Magnet recognition from the American Nurses Credentialing Center, a benchmark of excellence in nursing and patient care achieved by fewer than 10% of hospitals nationwide. That kind of culture means nurses are treated as professionals with a stake in how their units run, which makes it all the more important that the systems supporting them actually work.

The Problem

Kristy Lay was the Shift Scheduler for the Women's Care Center's high-risk labor and delivery unit. Her job was to build and maintain the shift schedule for a team of 60 registered nurses. In a unit that operates around the clock and handles some of the most medically complex deliveries in the state, coverage gaps are not an option.

But the process of building that schedule was entirely manual and entirely dependent on her. Every scheduling cycle meant hours of back-and-forth:

• Tracking who was available
• Accounting for requested days off
• Managing last-minute swaps
• Keeping everything updated in one place that only she could access.

By the time a schedule was finalized, Kristy had spent roughly 12 hours on it. Time that had to be rebuilt from scratch each cycle.

The nurses, meanwhile, had no visibility into the schedule except through her. If someone needed to swap a shift or check their upcoming days, they had to go through Kristy. There was no way to see open slots, no way to pick up extra shifts independently, and no mechanism for the team to self-manage any part of the process. All roads led back to one person.

A colleague who had been using SignUpGenius for carpools and potlucks suggested trying it for shift scheduling. The concept was straightforward: create time slots, open them to the nursing staff, and let the team manage their own availability in one shared place. Kristy decided to find out if it would work.

The Solution

Kristy set up the unit's shift schedule in SignUpGenius, building out time slots for each shift and opening them to the nursing staff. Instead of routing every request through her, nurses could now log in, see what was available, sign up for the shifts that worked for them, request days off, and swap shifts directly with colleagues, all without Kristy as the middleman.

The schedule became a shared resource rather than a document that lived with one person. Open slots were visible to everyone, which meant nurses who wanted to pick up additional shifts could do so on their own. Those who needed to make a change had the tools to handle it themselves. The information that previously existed only in Kristy's process was now accessible to the whole team, on their own schedule, whenever they needed it.

The NICU heard what was happening in the labor and delivery unit and asked to try the same approach. They made the switch and did not look back.

The Results

The time Kristy spent on scheduling dropped from 12 hours per cycle to 6. That is not a small efficiency gain in a role where time is already scarce, it is a full workday returned to her each scheduling period.

But the more significant outcome was what happened on the nursing side. When staff gained direct access to their own schedules and the ability to manage their own availability, their relationship to the schedule changed. They were no longer passive recipients of a plan someone else made for them. They had a say in their own shifts, a clear view of what was coming, and the tools to adapt when something needed to change.

For a Magnet-designated hospital that explicitly values nurse autonomy and professional empowerment, that shift mattered. Staff satisfaction around scheduling went up and the impact was concrete enough that the NICU adopted the same system.

In Their Words

"As the scheduler, [SignUpGenius] has decreased the amount of time that I need to spend on the schedule from about 12 hours to 6 hours."

"The nurses feel like they have more control over their own schedules. It allows the staff to sign up for the shifts that work best for them."

"The main impact [of SignUpGenius] has been on increased staff satisfaction."

"It is very user friendly and it is an easy system to use and navigate."

-- Kristy Lay, Shift Scheduler, Women's Care Center at University of Colorado Hospital