Analytical Methods for Planning and Scheduling Daily Work in Inpatient Care Settings: Opportunities for Research and Practice

This article identifies current challenges in the planning and execution of daily work in inpatient care settings. Inadequate planning of the processes and resources associated with inpatient care services may negatively affect their effectiveness. It may also lead to burnout of healthcare workers when the resulting work plan is unknowingly infeasible or does not incorporate the necessary human factors considerations. This paper provides with an overview of current research on inpatient care workflow planning, as well as with directions for researchers and practitioners to advance this problem using a combination of human factors engineering and analytical methods.