Nurse Absenteeism and Staffing Strategies for Hospital Inpatient Units

Nurse managers regularly make decisions that include assigning nurses to inpatient units and adjusting staffing when anticipated demand exceeds scheduled nurse shifts. These types of decisions are affected by absenteeism. We use data from multiple inpatient units of two hospitals to study which factors, including unit culture, short-term workload, and shift type explain nurse absenteeism. The analysis highlights the importance of paying attention to unit-level factors and absentee-rate heterogeneity among individual nurses. We develop models to investigate the impact of demand and absentee rate variability on the performance of staffing plans and obtain some structural results. Utilizing these results, we propose and test several easy-to-use heuristics to identify near optimal staffing strategies for inpatient units. Although motivated by staffing of hospital inpatient units, the approach developed in this paper is applicable to other labor intensive service environments.