Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/315268 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Citation: 
[Journal:] Health Care Management Science [ISSN:] 1572-9389 [Volume:] 27 [Issue:] 2 [Publisher:] Springer US [Place:] New York, NY [Year:] 2024 [Pages:] 239-253
Publisher: 
Springer US, New York, NY
Abstract: 
Faced by a severe shortage of nurses and increasing demand for care, hospitals need to optimally determine their staffing levels. Ideally, nurses should be staffed to those shifts where they generate the highest positive value for the quality of healthcare. This paper develops an approach that identifies the incremental benefit of staffing an additional nurse depending on the patient mix. Based on the reasoning that timely fulfillment of care demand is essential for the healthcare process and its quality in the critical care setting, we propose to measure the incremental benefit of staffing an additional nurse through reductions in time until care arrives (TUCA). We determine TUCA by relying on queuing theory and parametrize the model with real data collected through an observational study. The study indicates that using the TUCA concept and applying queuing theory at the care event level has the potential to improve quality of care for a given nurse capacity by efficiently trading situations of high versus low workload.
Subjects: 
Nursing demand
Flexibility
Quality
Queuing
Staffing
Operations research
Operations management
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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