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- Title
Incorporating nurse absenteeism into staffing with demand uncertainty.
- Authors
Maass, Kayse; Liu, Boying; Daskin, Mark; Duck, Mary; Wang, Zhehui; Mwenesi, Rama; Schapiro, Hannah; Maass, Kayse Lee; Daskin, Mark S
- Abstract
Increased nurse-to-patient ratios are associated negatively with increased costs and positively with improved patient care and reduced nurse burnout rates. Thus, it is critical from a cost, patient safety, and nurse satisfaction perspective that nurses be utilized efficiently and effectively. To address this, we propose a stochastic programming formulation for nurse staffing that accounts for variability in the patient census and nurse absenteeism, day-to-day correlations among the patient census levels, and costs associated with three different classes of nursing personnel: unit, pool, and temporary nurses. The decisions to be made include: how many unit nurses to employ, how large a pool of cross-trained nurses to maintain, how to allocate the pool nurses on a daily basis, and how many temporary nurses to utilize daily. A genetic algorithm is developed to solve the resulting model. Preliminary results using data from a large university hospital suggest that the proposed model can save a four-unit pool hundreds of thousands of dollars annually as opposed to the crude heuristics the hospital currently employs.
- Subjects
NURSE-patient ratio; JOB absenteeism; PATIENT safety; NURSE supply &; demand; PSYCHOLOGICAL burnout prevention; MULTISKILLED medical personnel; WORKING hour statistics; ALGORITHMS; WORKING hours; MEDICAL needs assessment; STATISTICS; UNCERTAINTY; STATISTICAL models; HOSPITAL nursing staff
- Publication
Health Care Management Science, 2017, Vol 20, Issue 1, p141
- ISSN
1386-9620
- Publication type
journal article
- DOI
10.1007/s10729-015-9345-z