Development of a mixed binary integer programming model for nurse-patient assignment

Abstract

In every hospital, during a typical working shift, patients’ conditions are varied. Some of them only need usual care activities while others may need higher care levels. The process of nurse-patient assignment occurs at the beginning of each shift. In this process, the head nurse assigns a number of patients to each nurse throughout the shift. The difference between patient conditions makes it difficult for the head nurse to generate an assignment with balanced nurse workloads. In this paper, a mixed binary integer programming model is developed for generating assignments with balanced workloads for nurses. Infants’ ward of a hospital is considered as case study and an existing acuity system which quantifies the workload of each patient is used to examine the performance of the model. The results of this study clearly illustrate the capabilities of the proposed model in generating optimal assignment that balances the workload of nurses by minimizing the difference between maximum and minimum acuity assigned to nurses