Nursing Care Scheduling Problem: Analysis of Inpatient Nursing

In most Japanese hospitals, different nurses handle the pre-assigned nursing cares in different ways, which directly affect the quality of nursing cares. Thus, it is necessary to quantitatively elucidate the nurses' action rules for nursing instruction in high-quality care provision and evaluation of staffing levels. Keeping track of times of relative effectiveness in meeting and connecting with another can reveal and extend one's skills of engagement in practical nursing cares. Therefore, modelling inpatient nursing from the viewpoint of scheduling, we propose a new method to quantitatively elucidate the implicit action rules of nurses on their provision of nursing cares engaged in practical nursing cares, according to a set of candidate existing dispatching rules. In simulations to match the nursing care schedules planned by dispatching rules with the observed ones, we conclude that (1) nurses make schedules based on the rules similar to the dispatching rule of earliest due date (EDD), which means they refer the evaluated preparation times of activities and their expected finishing times assigned in worksheets, and (2) nursing staffing level have an inverse relation (-0.68 for preparation coefficients the ratio of preparation time evaluated to that in manuals to work tenures based on the linear regression analysis) with the evaluated preparation times, which should be one issue on the possibilities that nurses provide nursing cares as scheduled in worksheets.