Analysis of daily nursing care: a nursing care scheduling algorithm

Nurses are with the primary mission to provide quality services to patients up to 24 hours a day. In general, different nurses (especially between nurse experts and novices) handle the pre-assigned nursing cares in different ways, which directly affect the quality of nursing cares. In this respect, it is necessary to quantitatively elucidate the nursespsila action rules for effectively nursing instruction and quantitative evaluation of staffing levels. In this paper, we will analyze the daily nursing cares to quantitatively illustrate the implicit action rules of nurses on their provision of cares from the viewpoint of scheduling. Unlike the conventional methods mainly based on the interviews/dialogues, we hypothetically model the nursespsila action rules as some traditional dispatching rules, and elucidate the nursespsila action rules by evaluating the similarities of the actual nursing care schedules with planned nursing care ones. By analyzing several actual observed nursing cares, we quantitatively elucidate the action rules of veterans and novices, and furthermore, we compared their differences on the rules.