Assigning patients to nurses in neonatal intensive care
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An intensive care nursery provides health care for critically ill newborn infants. During a typical shift, infants range from those needing only occasional care to those requiring constant attention. At the beginning of each shift, the head nursegroups the patients for assignment to staff nurses. Typically each nurse cares for one group of infants throughout the shift.The large variation in infant conditions along with several complicating side constraints makes it difficult to developbalanced nurse work loads. We develop a mathematical programming approach for achieving better workload balance.We first develop a detailed neonatal acuity system that quantifies the nursing workload of each patient. We then developan integer linear program that assigns patients to nurses while balancing nurse workloads. Because this model iscomputationally intractable, we develop a heuristic that exploits the fact that most nurseries are divided into a number ofphysical zones. We use ten case studies taken from a major university hospital to benchmark the performance of thisheuristic. We also perform a designed experiment using randomly generated problems that examines the effect of nurseryparameters on heuristic performance. 2002 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved.
