Find nurses available for urgent shifts

In any care facility, there is always a chance that, a few hours before a shift starts, a nurse will report an unexpected absence. At that point a race against the clock begins to find staff, still based on phone calls, improvisation and a heavy operational toll.

Spain's statistics office, the INE, counted 358,036 registered nurses in 2025, a rate of 7.22 per 1,000 inhabitants. Eurostat, which counts only those practising, recorded 284,232 in Spain in 2023.

What happens when there is a last minute absence

An unexpected absence affects continuity of care, day to day operations and the wellbeing of the staff themselves.

When the team is told that a nurse will not be able to come in for a shift, whether because of sudden illness, family reasons or any other emergency, several effects kick in almost automatically:

• Internal operations are interrupted

The supervisor, HR or the person in charge of each facility has to stop what they are doing to deal with an urgent need that cannot wait. This delays key tasks for the day or creates a knock-on effect on other departments.

• Overload on the team on duty

While cover is being sought, the staff on duty start to absorb part of the work, increasing care pressure and the risk of errors. Workloads shoot up and the experience of the patient or resident can be compromised.

• Improvisation and organisational stress

The traditional process creates constant interruptions, calls outside working hours and emotional strain for whoever coordinates the cover. The urgency forces people to “make do with whoever is around”, even without any certainty that the available profile is the right one.

Traditional methods: useful, but not enough for today's needs

Despite being widely used, the classic ways of covering urgent shifts have significant limitations. Most care facilities still rely on three main routes:

1. Calling internal staff

The first step is usually to contact professionals on the payroll who are off duty or who have already covered other shifts.

• Low availability at critical times (holidays, weekends, nights)
• Risk of overloading the team and increasing turnover
• No way to protect the right to disconnect

2. Contacting temping agencies or external suppliers

Although they are quick, there are not always enough profiles available or adequate traceability.

• Slow administrative processes
• High costs
• Little visibility of the assigned professional's track record
• Lack of flexibility for needs that change every day

3. Improvised messages in the team's WhatsApp groups

A very common practice when time is short.

• Scattered information that is hard to record.
• The right to disconnect is broken.
• No guarantee about who can or cannot take the shift.
• No traceability or control over profiles, experience or certifications.

Conclusion: these strategies can work at certain moments, but they do not provide a stable, scalable or safe system for a facility that needs to cover urgent shifts on a regular basis.

Why hiring alone does not fix this

The intuitive answer to recurring absence is to expand the payroll. The data says that route is narrower than it looks. According to the Spanish statistical office's register of licensed health professionals, the number of registered nurses in Spain grew by 1.2 % in 2025, the slowest rate of the last five years, reaching 358,036.

That 1.2 % contrasts with other health professions in the same year: occupational therapists grew by 9.2 %, clinical psychologists by 8.6 % and physiotherapists by 4.7 %. Nursing is the largest group, 34.5 % of all registered health professionals, and at the same time one of the slowest growing.

There is also an important difference between being registered and being in practice. For 2023 the INE counted 346,207 registered nurses, while Eurostat, which counts only those practising, recorded 284,232 in Spain that same year. That is a gap of roughly 62,000 professionals, around 18 %.

The practical conclusion for a facility is uncomfortable but useful: the pool you can draw on tomorrow morning is not the one in the register, it is the one that is available, verified and willing to cover that particular shift. Expanding the payroll is a decision measured in years. Covering tonight's shift is a decision measured in hours, and the two compete for the same supervisor's attention.

How Livo changes a facility's day to day

How can a model that combines external shifts and technology transform the response to these staffing emergencies?

What used to be an improvised emergency (calls, chats, spreadsheets) becomes a fast, traceable and controlled process.

Having a pool of verified professionals available across different time slots makes it possible to respond quickly without overloading permanent staff. Care facilities can cover shifts immediately with qualified, previously validated profiles, maintaining continuity of care.

Livo gives access to a network of more than 75,000 professionals, ensuring speed, safety and stability in the service. Facilities no longer depend solely on their internal team.

Facilities can filter by speciality, experience and type of unit (ICU, inpatient wards, mental health, emergency care, geriatrics and so on), moving from “let's see who can come in” to “who fits this shift best”. Every professional goes through a prior validation process (identity, qualifications, experience), so any profile that gets to request shifts has already been checked by the Livo team.

From a single platform, the nursing supervision or management team handles the whole flow: shifts published, applications received, filtered profiles and later evaluations.

• Fewer interruptions and more time for critical tasks: fewer improvised calls and chats.
• More stable continuity of care: less dependence on internal availability and less pressure on teams.
• Faster cover: access to available profiles within minutes.
• Confidence in every external professional: validated healthcare staff and fewer risks in urgent hiring.
• A better experience for professionals and for the organisation: clear processes, without improvisation, that make external nurses want to work with the same facility again.

Last minute absences will not disappear, but the way they are managed can change radically. For care facilities, having a network of available professionals and a platform that centralises the management of urgent shifts makes it possible to act quickly, safeguard continuity of care, protect the internal team and avoid improvisation.

Three routes that are not the same thing

Internal bank

The list of the facility's own professionals who get called when someone is missing: staff on rest days, bank workers who have worked there before, sometimes former trainees. It looks like the fastest route and it is the most draining, because every call competes with the rest of someone who has already worked their shift.

Temporary work agency

The agency is the professional's employer and assigns them to the facility for a period. It provides cover without the facility taking on the hiring, and in exchange the facility sees little of the history of whoever arrives and depends on who the agency has free that day.

Shift management platform

Here the facility publishes the shift with its requirements and verified professionals apply. Two things change compared with the routes above: the facility chooses between applications instead of accepting an assignment, and there is a record of who covered which shift, with what qualification and with what rating afterwards.