Absenteeism and Nurse Staffing

Nurse managers regularly make decisions that include assigning nurses with similar skills to similar inpatient units, adjusting staffing when anticipated demand exceeds available nurse shifts, and choosing the number of nurses who float to different units depending on realized demand. All of these decisions are affected by absenteeism. We use data from multiple nursing 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 differences in individual nurses’ absentee rates. We also propose a staffing model and heuristics for solving staffing problems described above.