Resources · Holiday coverage

What to do when the same nurse always gets holiday call

By Antonimar Mello, BSN, RN, a working perioperative nurse on Long Island and the founder of OnCallRank. Published July 6, 2026.

If the same nurse keeps landing holiday call, the cause is almost always missing memory, not malice: nobody kept a reliable record of who covered each holiday in past years, so each holiday gets decided fresh. The fix is a year-over-year holiday log, a ranking that everyone can see, and an assignment made in the open weeks before the date.

Why holiday call drifts onto the same people

Holiday assignments repeat because the unit's memory of last year is informal, and informal memory favors whoever speaks up first.

Three quiet mechanisms do the damage:

• Recency amnesia. By the time Labor Day comes around, who worked it last year is a matter of recollection. The nurse who remembers accurately is usually the one who worked it, and being right does not always win the argument.
• The reliable volunteer. Someone says yes every year, out of guilt or habit. The unit reads it as solved. Two years later that nurse is burned out and resentful, and the manager never technically assigned anything unfairly.
• Deciding late. When the assignment happens the week of the holiday, whoever has travel booked is untouchable and whoever stayed flexible pays for it. Deciding late punishes the accommodating.

Keep the record across years, not just across months

A holiday log only works if it survives from one year to the next: holiday, date, who covered it, and whether they volunteered or were assigned.

Most units keep some version of a call calendar, but it resets annually with the schedule template, and the holiday history resets with it. The log you need is small. One line per holiday per year covers it:

The "volunteered or assigned" column matters more than it looks. A nurse who volunteered last year has a claim to be left alone this year. A nurse who was assigned last year has a stronger one. Without the column, both read as "worked it," and the distinction that staff actually care about disappears.

Rank in the open, weeks ahead

Publish who is up for each holiday well before the date, ranked by the record: last year's coverage first, then your unit's seniority rule, then volunteers.

The exact ranking recipe matters less than the fact that it is published and consistent. A workable default: anyone who covered this holiday last year goes to the bottom of the list, volunteers who want it move to the top, and everyone in between sits in your unit's normal seniority order. When the list is visible weeks out, two good things happen. Staff who mind can object while there is still time to adjust, and staff who do not mind can trade or volunteer on their own terms instead of being cornered by a late ask.

Protect the perpetual volunteer too

Fairness cuts both ways: the nurse who always says yes needs the record as much as the nurse who feels dodged, because the record is what lets a manager say "not you this year" with a reason attached.

Managers usually frame holiday fairness as protecting people from being over-assigned. The mirror problem is quieter: the person who keeps volunteering becomes load-bearing, and the unit stops noticing it is leaning on them. A visible year-over-year record turns "she always takes it" from a habit into a fact on a page, and facts on a page get corrected.

Where software fits

A tool helps when it keeps the multi-year record automatically and shows the ranking to everyone, so the holiday decision is a review, not a negotiation.

OnCallRank handles holiday coverage exactly this way, because its founder is a working perioperative RN who lived this exact problem from the staff side: the holiday panel ranks the unit's nurses with their seniority position and a flag for who covered the same holiday the previous year, volunteers are visible, and the final assignment notifies every affected person and lands in the permanent history. Nothing about it touches patient data, so a unit can try it without an IT project. The trial is free for three weeks, no card: start your free trial, or book a 15-minute call.