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On evaluating the impact of flexibility enhancing strategies on the performance of nurse schedules
Hospitals develop nurse schedules that cover a period of 4–6 weeks and are posted several weeks in advance. Once posted, changes to the schedule require voluntary participation by the nurses, making it difficult for hospitals to respond to changes in nursing needs and availability of nurses. At the...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Elsevier Ireland Ltd.
2009
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7126851/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19699004 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2009.07.003 |
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author | Wang, Wen-Ya Gupta, Diwakar Potthoff, Sandra |
author_facet | Wang, Wen-Ya Gupta, Diwakar Potthoff, Sandra |
author_sort | Wang, Wen-Ya |
collection | PubMed |
description | Hospitals develop nurse schedules that cover a period of 4–6 weeks and are posted several weeks in advance. Once posted, changes to the schedule require voluntary participation by the nurses, making it difficult for hospitals to respond to changes in nursing needs and availability of nurses. At the same time, nursing needs’ forecasts developed several weeks in advance are often wrong. In each hospital setting, there may exist several promising strategies to enhance scheduling flexibility and reduce the mismatch between the nursing needs and the availability of nurses. However, methodologies to evaluate such strategies, before testing them in expensive pilot implementation, do not exist. We demonstrate how such evaluations can be carried out using historical data. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of our approach by evaluating the benefits of a strategy where nurses are divided into two cohorts and schedules are phase shifted for the two cohorts. Staggering schedules allows nursing unit managers to benefit from more frequent updating of needs’ assessments without having to change work rules. Upon applying our approach to data from a large urban hospital, we discovered that in this example staggering did not improve the performance of nurse schedules. We discuss possible reasons for this result, its implications for hospital managers, and other potential uses of our approach. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7126851 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2009 |
publisher | Elsevier Ireland Ltd. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-71268512020-04-08 On evaluating the impact of flexibility enhancing strategies on the performance of nurse schedules Wang, Wen-Ya Gupta, Diwakar Potthoff, Sandra Health Policy Article Hospitals develop nurse schedules that cover a period of 4–6 weeks and are posted several weeks in advance. Once posted, changes to the schedule require voluntary participation by the nurses, making it difficult for hospitals to respond to changes in nursing needs and availability of nurses. At the same time, nursing needs’ forecasts developed several weeks in advance are often wrong. In each hospital setting, there may exist several promising strategies to enhance scheduling flexibility and reduce the mismatch between the nursing needs and the availability of nurses. However, methodologies to evaluate such strategies, before testing them in expensive pilot implementation, do not exist. We demonstrate how such evaluations can be carried out using historical data. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of our approach by evaluating the benefits of a strategy where nurses are divided into two cohorts and schedules are phase shifted for the two cohorts. Staggering schedules allows nursing unit managers to benefit from more frequent updating of needs’ assessments without having to change work rules. Upon applying our approach to data from a large urban hospital, we discovered that in this example staggering did not improve the performance of nurse schedules. We discuss possible reasons for this result, its implications for hospital managers, and other potential uses of our approach. Elsevier Ireland Ltd. 2009-12 2009-08-20 /pmc/articles/PMC7126851/ /pubmed/19699004 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2009.07.003 Text en Copyright © 2009 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. |
spellingShingle | Article Wang, Wen-Ya Gupta, Diwakar Potthoff, Sandra On evaluating the impact of flexibility enhancing strategies on the performance of nurse schedules |
title | On evaluating the impact of flexibility enhancing strategies on the performance of nurse schedules |
title_full | On evaluating the impact of flexibility enhancing strategies on the performance of nurse schedules |
title_fullStr | On evaluating the impact of flexibility enhancing strategies on the performance of nurse schedules |
title_full_unstemmed | On evaluating the impact of flexibility enhancing strategies on the performance of nurse schedules |
title_short | On evaluating the impact of flexibility enhancing strategies on the performance of nurse schedules |
title_sort | on evaluating the impact of flexibility enhancing strategies on the performance of nurse schedules |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7126851/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19699004 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2009.07.003 |
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