An experience with the use of WISN tool to calculate staffing in a palliative care hospital in Brazil

BACKGROUND: The article describes a healthcare staffing exercise that took place in a Cancer Hospital IV, Brazil’s first public palliative care unit. There are numerous gaps in the literature on specialized cancer staffing. Palliative care is a therapy modality that should begin with the diagnosis of a chronic disease, at which point the personnel must be technically and numerically adequate, as well as well-distributed, to provide coverage of the population that requires this type of care. METHODS: The WISN tool was chosen after a systematic review of the use of workload studies in palliative care, because it fulfills this objective. The WISN method is based on a health worker's workload, was developed in the late 1990s in the health sector and has been field-tested and implemented in several countries. Direct observation was used as the fieldwork approach, which was carried out by 18 research assistants with the assistance of two supervisors. They monitored 60 professionals in seven categories for 2 weeks on weekdays in the morning and afternoon periods: nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, medical, nutrition, psychology, and social services. RESULTS: Except for the medical staff, which at the time included additional physicians on loan from a partner institution to address a shortage in this professional group, all categories exhibited overload with WISN ratios ranging from 0.53 to 0.97. The analysis of time spent on individual activities indicated flaws with the services' informal organizations. The authors also noticed a strong emphasis on support activities and a lack of a clear schedule for training and research. The study's findings included a definition of standard activities for each professional group, an analysis and comparison of activities by categories, departments, and work shifts, a standard workload for training and research, and recommendations to include human resources planning as a fundamental part of a national policy for palliative care. CONCLUSIONS: The WISN tool can be used to plan human resources in cancer centers that provide palliative care, and it provides for a variety of analyses that can be combined with other approaches in the literature.