Summer Staffing for Urgent Care in Tourist Markets

An urgent care in a beach town, a lake district or a national park gateway doesn't have the steady volume of a neighborhood clinic. Visits climb when the visitors arrive and fall when they leave. The same weeks are when your own team wants time off, so summer staffing in a tourist market has to cover a larger schedule with a smaller permanent team.

The calendar is the one thing working in your favor. School lets out, the holiday weekends land where they always land, and the season winds down after Labor Day. A problem that arrives on a known date can be staffed months ahead, and the rest of this post is about what to do in which month.

Why summer staffing is harder in a tourist market

Demand and supply move in opposite directions. Visitors bring the injuries and illnesses that come with travel and outdoor recreation, and they bring them to the nearest walk-in clinic because their own doctor is several hundred miles away. Your visit count rises with the town's occupancy.

Your permanent team lives in that town because summers there are good. Physicians, NPs, PAs, RNs and MAs who worked through a quiet off-season put in their vacation requests early, and most clinics honor them. The weeks with the most patients are the weeks with the fewest permanent staff on the schedule.

Every other seasonal clinic has the same calendar. An operator who starts looking for summer coverage in late May is looking at the same time as every clinic that also waited, for the same dates.

Find your own summer staffing peaks

Summer isn't one flat busy period. Expect peaks around Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day, with a lower baseline between them. The exact shape depends on what brings people to your town and when the school calendars around you start and end.

Your visit history is a better guide than a general summer calendar. Pull the last two or three summers by week and by day, and mark the weeks that ran well above the seasonal baseline. Look closely at the last two weeks of August, which are easy to under-staff if you taper coverage on the assumption that the season is ending. The method is covered in forecasting walk-in volume from historical data.

Set that forecast beside the approved vacation calendar. The difference between the provider hours each week needs and the hours your permanent team will work is your summer staffing gap, week by week. Staffing ratios by patient volume walks through the arithmetic.

Start summer staffing in late winter

The work is sequential, which is why it starts in February. A locum clinician has to be found, reviewed against your clinic's requirements, scheduled and oriented, and each step waits on the one before it.

February: find the clinicians. Start with anyone who has covered your clinic before. Then post the summer shifts you already know you'll need. The goal this month is a list of interested clinicians, with firm dates to follow.

March: start your credentialing review. Whatever your clinic checks before a clinician can work a shift, begin it for everyone on the list now. Don't wait for a signed schedule first. If you don't know how long your own review takes from first document to cleared, time it this year and plan next year around the real number.

April: turn the forecast into shifts. Publish the specific dates and hours you need covered and collect commitments against them. A clinician with a cleared file and named dates has something concrete to hold in their calendar.

May: finish, orient and line up backup. Clear the remaining files, send logins and orientation material, and name a backup for each holiday shift. What a locum needs before a first shift covers the orientation side.

Put the destination in the shift listing

A tourist market has something to offer that a clinic elsewhere doesn't: clinicians may want to spend part of their summer there. That only helps if the listing says so. A listing that gives hours and a rate and nothing else reads like every other listing in the country.

Say where the clinic is, what the shift pattern leaves free, and whether consecutive days are available for someone who wants to stay a week or two. State the rate plainly. Decide what you'll pay for the holiday dates before you post them, because a clinician working July 4 is giving up their own holiday and will weigh the shift that way. On Rediworks, the rate, location, shift length and facility show on every listing before a clinician applies.

Housing is the limit on this advantage. A clinician who lives within driving distance can pick up single shifts. One who would travel in needs somewhere to stay during the most expensive weeks of your town's year. If your summer plan depends on clinicians flying in and you can't help with lodging, a traditional agency that arranges travel and housing is the better fit for those shifts.

Treat summer locum coverage as core staffing

When part of the permanent team is on vacation during the busiest weeks, locum clinicians aren't filling the edges of the schedule. They're carrying a real share of the day's visits, and the preparation has to match that role.

That means full EMR access and logins before the first shift, a clear picture of what the clinic does and doesn't handle on site, and a named person to ask. It also means covering the administrative differences that come with visitors: out-of-state insurance, patients without their records at hand, and follow-up that has to be handed to a clinician back home.

A clinician who covered your clinic last summer already knows all of this. Keep a list of everyone who worked well with your team, and contact them first each February. Each returning clinician is one fewer first shift to run during a peak week.

Back up the holiday shifts

The hardest day to replace someone is the day everyone else is also fully booked. For each holiday shift, name a second clinician who has already cleared your review and has agreed to be called. Decide in advance who makes that call and what rate they're authorized to offer.

If a shift can't be covered at all, the costs go beyond the lost visits. What an unfilled urgent care shift costs lays out how to add them up for your own clinic.

A summer staffing calendar

Rediworks is a self-service marketplace for urgent care locum shifts. You post the shifts you need by clinician type and date, and clinicians apply with a credential wallet they've already built. Sign up to post shifts.