Nurse-patient relationship for multi-period home health care routing and scheduling problem

Abstract

This article proposes a novel dynamic objective function in a multi-period home health care (HHC) problem, known as the nurse-patient relationship (NPR). The nurse-patient relationship score indicating the trust a patient has for his or her care worker increases when the same people meet regularly and decreases when they are apart. Managing human resources in HHC is a combination of routing and scheduling problems. Due to computational complexity of the HHC problem, a 28-day home health care problem is decomposed into daily subproblems, and solved sequentially with the tabu search. The solutions are then combined to give a solution to the original problem. For problems with less complex constraints, the NPR model can also be solved using exact methods such as CPLEX. For larger scale instances, however, the numerical results show that the NPR model can only be solved in reasonable times using our proposed tabu search approach. The solutions obtained from the NPR models are compared against those from existing models in the literature such as preference and continuity of care. Essentially, the analysis revealed that the proposed NPR models encouraged the search algorithm to assign the same care worker to visit the same patient. In addition, it had a tendency to assign a care worker on consecutive days to each patient, which is one of the key factors in promoting trust between patients and care workers. This leads to the efficacy of monitoring patient’s disease progression and treatment.

Acceptability and feasibility of a comprehensive fall prevention model for independent older adults: A qualitative evaluation

“…Participants emphasized that in addition to learning how to prevent falls, they were able to socialize and establish a close bond with the interventionist in charge of the follow-up. This coincides with other studies which indicate that the trust a patient has in their caregiver increases when the same people meet regularly ( Krityakierne et al, 2022 ). Likewise, when the professional-user relationship is established on the basis of essential attributes such as empathy, presence, contact, authenticity, trust and reciprocity ( Allande-Cussó et al, 2022 ), the quality of care and the satisfaction of both parties improves ( Molina-Mula & Gallo-estrada, 2020 ).…”

Partial Leader Optimizer

“…Sajadi and Ahmadi [31] combined GA with vibration damping optimization (VDO) to optimize the inventory management of perishable products. Krityakierne et al [32] used TS to optimize home healthcare routing and scheduling. There are several reasons for this circumstance.…”

Nurse-patient Relationships and Expatiate Nurse in Saudi Arabia: Challenges and Implications

“…Thus, for a therapeutic relationship to occur, there needs to be genuine empathy that allows for approachability, availability for a beneficial presence and engagement among the parties that reflects respect and trust to allow for the achievement of progress toward care outcomes [17] . Scholars have studied the nature of the nurse-patient relationship among psychiatric nurses [14,17] , home health care [18] , accident and emergency departments [19] and general nursing practice [16] . From these studies, it can be concluded that therapeutic relationships support both patient's psychological and physical needs.…”