Abstract
The health care system in the United States has a shortage of nurses. A careful planning of nurse resources is needed to ease the health care system from the burden of the nurse shortage and standardize nurse workload. An earlier research study developed a data-integrated simulation to evaluate nurse-patient assignments (SIMNA) at the beginning of a shift based on a real data set provided by a northeast Texas hospital. In this research, with the aid of the same SIMNA model, two policies are developed to make nurse-to-patient assignments when new patients are admitted during a shift. A heuristic (HEU) policy assigns a newly-admitted patient to the nurse who has performed the least assigned direct care among all the nurses. A partially-optimized (OPT) policy seeks to minimize the difference in workload among nurses for the entire shift by estimating the assigned direct care from SIMNA. Results comparing HEU and OPT policies are presented.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 210-221 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Health Care Management Science |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2010 Sept |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Acknowledgements This research was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant number 053963. The first author gratefully acknowledges summer research grant from Steven L. Craig School of Business which enabled the successful completion of this research. The authors thank three anonymous reviewers and the editor-in-chief for a constructive review process and useful comments.
Keywords
- Nurse assignment
- Patient assignment
- Simulation-based optimization
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Medicine (miscellaneous)
- General Health Professions