Nursing care scheduling problem: Analysis of staffing levels

Nursing, with the primary mission to provide quality services to patients up to 24 hours a day, is accompanied by a serial of activities like patients´ assessment, outcomes identification, etc. As we know, hospitals with lower nurse staffing levels tend to have higher rates of poor patient outcomes. However, increasing staffing levels is not yet an easy task. Therefore, an online nursing scheduling system is practically mandatory to instruct nurses´ actions for high-quality nursing cares. In general, major difficulties contributing to propose an effective scheduling system include the nurse action rules and necessary reference information. In this respect, we illustrate the ways of nurses to handle their works from the viewpoint of scheduling in this paper. By hypothetically modelling the action rules as some traditional dispatching rules, we analyse the difference of nursing staffing levels (especially between nurse experts and novices). Implementing a set of traditional dispatching rules on several actual nursing cares, this paper concludes the closest ones to nurses´ action rules. It also concludes that nurse experts consider the preparation tasks more, and handle them with a slack time.