Summer leave planning starts now for Tasmanian aged care

December and January are the hardest months to roster in Tasmanian aged care. Leave requests concentrate, school holidays pull staff away, casual availability thins out and the pool of nurses willing to pick up extra shifts is smaller than at any other point in the year. The planning window for that period closes earlier than most rosters assume.

The reason is the notice requirement. Where an employee has accrued excessive annual leave, the Nurses Award allows an employer to direct them to take some of it, but only after a genuine attempt to reach agreement and with at least 8 weeks notice before the leave begins. Counting back from mid-December puts the deadline in the third week of October. The conversation itself needs to happen earlier again.

What counts as excessive

Under the Nurses Award 2020, an accrual becomes excessive at more than 10 weeks of paid annual leave, or more than 12 weeks for a shiftworker. Either party can seek a discussion about reducing it. Where agreement is not reached, the employer may give a written direction, subject to two limits. The employee must be left with at least 6 weeks of accrued leave. Any directed period must run for at least one week.

Check the applicable enterprise agreement before relying on the award position. Several Tasmanian aged care agreements have been approved or varied in the past year. Where an agreement covers the same ground it sets the terms that apply, so the award clause is the starting point rather than the answer.

Large balances are a workforce signal, not just a liability

A nurse carrying 10 weeks of leave has usually been unable to take it. That points to thin rosters, unfilled lines or a habit of cancelling leave when someone resigns. The accounting treatment matters, since the provision sits on the balance sheet and grows with every pay increase.

The workforce signal matters more. The conditions that stop leave being taken are the conditions people leave over, so a rising provision is often the earliest quantified warning a provider gets about turnover. There is more on that link in our piece on the roster as a retention tool.

A leave balance that will not come down is telling you the roster has no slack in it.

Summer is also when recruitment gets harder

Candidate availability in Tasmanian aged care tightens from late November. Nurses considering a move tend to settle it before Christmas or wait until February, so a vacancy advertised in December often sits through January with very little activity. Providers who wait until the roster breaks are recruiting into the thinnest part of the year at the point they can least afford a slow process.

The practical consequence is that summer leave planning and summer recruitment are the same exercise. Working out in August which lines will be uncovered gives you three months of normal hiring conditions to fill them. Leaving it until the leave requests arrive gives you three weeks of poor ones.

What to do in August

• Pull current leave balances and flag anyone above the award or agreement threshold
• Open the conversation about summer leave now, while genuine agreement is still achievable
• Map December and January against known RN coverage before approving anything
• Identify the shifts you will need to fill, then start recruiting for them rather than assuming agency availability
• Diarise the notice deadline where a direction is likely, since 8 weeks is a minimum rather than a target
• Decide early which senior roles cannot be uncovered at the same time

Fixed-term contracts covering a defined summer period are worth considering where the gap is predictable. They give a nurse a clear commitment and give the home certainty, without the cost and disruption of filling the same shifts through agency at short notice. In a competitive December market, a contract offered in August also reaches candidates before anyone else is asking.

The bottom line

Summer rostering is a compliance question, a cash flow question and a retention question at once. Providers who start in August have room to agree leave rather than direct it, which is the version that preserves goodwill. Providers who start in November are choosing between refusing leave and running short.

The reasons people accumulate leave in the first place are the reasons they eventually resign. The exit interview most operators skip works through what those conversations tend to reveal once it is too late to act on them.