An integrated nurse staffing and scheduling analysis for longer-term nursing staff allocation problems

The efficient and effective management of nursing personnel is of critical importance in a hospital's environment comprising a vast share of the operational costs. The adopted nurse workforce practices and policies highly affect the nurses' working conditions and the provided quality of care. Policy decisions on the staffing level have an impact on the outcome of the scheduling level and vice versa. Isolated reasoning typically leads to suboptimal decisions often resulting in ineffective outcomes of care. In order to overcome these inefficiencies, we propose in this paper a new integrative nurse staffing and shift scheduling approach. We test and assess the benefits of our approach in a reallife environment. Moreover, we examine the impact of several personnel policies on the staffing decision.

► An integrated methodology for allocating workforce to departments is presented.
► The suggested approach is based on the hospital's nurse staffing policies.
► An overview of the relevant literature on nurse workforce management is given.
► Insights in the impact of nurse staffing and shift scheduling policies are provided.