Journal
OPERATIONS RESEARCH FOR HEALTH CARE
Volume 3, Issue 2, Pages 48-58Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.orhc.2014.01.003
Keywords
Home care; Nurse-to-patient assignment; Stochastic demands; Continuity of care
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Home Care (HC) providers are complex organizations that manage a large number of patients, different categories of operators, support staff and material resources in a context affected by high variability. Hence, robust resource planning is crucial for operations in HC organizations, in order to avoid process inefficiencies, treatment delays, and low quality of service. Under continuity of care, one of the main issues in HC planning is the assignment of a reference nurse to each assisted patient, because this decision has an impact on the workload assigned to the nurse for the entire patient's length of stay. In this paper, we derive an analytical structural policy for solving the nurse-to-patient assignment problem in the HC context under continuity of care. This policy accounts for randomness related to both the demands from patients already assigned to nurses and the demands from new patients who need assignments. The policy is compared to other previously developed approaches, and applied to a relevant real case. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available