In most Japanese hospitals, different nurses handle the pre-assigned nursing cares in different ways, which directly affect the quality of nursing cares. To our knowledge, there has been less attention on ensuring that nurses provide nursing cares in a timely and accurate fashion. Consequently, in this paper, considering the similarities to the traditional job shop scheduling problems, we will model the daily nursing care scheduling problems and propose an efficient scheduling method based on simulated annealing algorithm. By iteratively local searching based on simulated annealing: (1) permutating the tasks from one nurse to another and (2) permutating the sub tasks handled by a nurse from its original position to another new one, the proposed method is evaluated to be applicable to the nursing care scheduling problems (providing comprehensive, coordinated and cost effective nursing cares to patients).
The purpose of this study is to evaluate a dynamic scheduling-based nursing support system for nurses working in acute care. Due to unpredictable occurrences such as random disturbances from patients and the variability of processing times in nursing care, inpatient nursing in practical environments is complex. In this study, we implement a nursing support system in a series of laboratory experiments under simulated conditions. In the laboratory experiments, clinical nurses are asked to perform assigned nursing tasks and simulated patients are used to make the environment realistic. Our results show that, compared to the nurses' performance based on their own procedures (rules of action), the dynamic scheduling method resulted in an average improvement of 71% in terms of earliness or tardiness of care. The proposed dynamic scheduling-based nursing support system is proven to be highly applicable to nursing work in practical nursing care environments.
Nursing, with the primary mission to provide quality services to patients, is accompanied by a serial of activities like patients assessment, outcomes identification for patients. In general, there has been less attention on ensuring that nurses provide nursing cares in a timely and accurate fashion. Consequently, in this paper, considering the similarity to the traditional job shop scheduling problems, we will model the daily nursing care scheduling problems and propose an efficient scheduling method based on simulated annealing algorithm. By the comparison of several nursing care plans obtained by the dispatching-rule based methods (which have been recognized to be the implementation of human thoughts), the proposed method is evaluated to be applicable to the nursing care scheduling problems (providing comprehensive, coordinated and cost effective nursing cares to patients).
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