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Care on demand in nursing homes: a queueing theoretic approach

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Abstract

Nursing homes face ever-tightening healthcare budgets and are searching for ways to increase the efficiency of their healthcare processes without losing sight of the needs of their residents. Optimizing the allocation of care workers plays a key role in this search as care workers are responsible for the daily care of the residents and account for a significant proportion of the total labor expenses. In practice, the lack of reliable data makes it difficult for nursing home managers to make informed staffing decisions. The focus of this study lies on the ‘care on demand’ process in a Belgian nursing home. Based on the analysis of real-life ‘call button’ data, a queueing model is presented which can be used by nursing home managers to determine the number of care workers required to meet a specific service level. Based on numerical experiments an 80/10 service level is proposed for this nursing home, meaning that at least 80 percent of the clients should receive care within 10 minutes after a call button request. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to develop a quantitative model for the ‘care on demand’ process in a nursing home.

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Notes

  1. From now on we use the term ‘healthcare activities’ instead of ‘(health)care and support activities’.

  2. The term ‘night’ refers to the time period between 22:45 and 5:45. This is the largest possible range in which the average number of arrivals per quarter does not exceed 2.2.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Niko Projects for providing us with a dataset and Jan-Pieter Dorsman for the simulation of the finite-source queueing model.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Karin van Eeden, Dennis Moeke & René Bekker

  2. School of Healthcare, Windesheim University of Applied Sciences, Hospitaaldreef 5, 1315 RC, Almere, The Netherlands

    Dennis Moeke

Authors
  1. Karin van Eeden
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  2. Dennis Moeke
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  3. René Bekker
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Correspondence to Dennis Moeke.

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van Eeden, K., Moeke, D. & Bekker, R. Care on demand in nursing homes: a queueing theoretic approach. Health Care Manag Sci 19, 227–240 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10729-014-9314-y

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