Planning the Nurses' Activities in the Intensive Care Unit of the Farshchian Cardiovascular Hospital in Hamedan with the Help of a Heuristic Algorithm Based on the Gert Method

Background: The intensive care unit is one of the most critical parts of the hospital, where the services provided to patients are of great importance. Because nurses have a high volume of work and should respond to patients at the earliest time, the existence of a curriculum is essential. Therefore, proper planning can reduce their fatigue and dissatisfaction caused by the high volume of work. Materials and Methods: In this research, all activities performed by nurses in the intensive care unit during different shifts for patients, their timing and their GERT network were drawn. The time of each activity was calculated in 4 optimistic time, most likely time, average time and pessimistic time. Also, the total time of activities that can be done by a nurse for one patient from the beginning to the end of the shift can be calculated based on these four modes and an innovative method was used for planning the nursing activities. Results: The results showed that the total time spent by nurses is significantly different. Therefore, with the help of the proposed algorithm, the activities were allocated to nurses in a way that it created a time equilibrium and significantly reduced the standard deviation and time domain of assigned activities. Conclusion: The proposed method showed that it is better to allocate patients' work to nurses instead of allocating the patient to the nurse. This will cause all nurses with a fairly equal workload, which can increase the satisfaction of nurses and increase the quality of service.