IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/jfr/ijba11/v2y2011i2p137-148.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Staffing and Scheduling Emergency Rooms in Two Public Hospitals: A Case Study

Author

Listed:
  • Sabah M. Al-Najjar
  • Samir Hussain Ali

Abstract

Emergency Rooms (ER) in hospitals are considered as an integral part of the health care system. The number of patients arriving to the ER constitutes a significant percentage of the total patients who demand health services from a hospital. Therefore insuring the ER services around the hour is very crucial to maximize patients' care. In addition, the efficient allocation and utilization of nurses and physicians is one of the most important issues facing ER administrators. Although demand on ER services in hospitals at Baghdad increases dramatically at certain incidents, we observed that the ERs, where we conducted the study, are overstaffed with nurses and physicians around the day. However, it is, always, desirable to operate any emergency room with minimum staff, while maintaining the quality of patient care. This paper simulates the patients' arrivals to determine the adequate number of nurses and physicians, required, over 24 hours, at the ERs of two large public hospitals at the city of Baghdad. The simulation results were adjusted and used to determine the number of physicians and nurses in each ER for one week, 3-shift working day. The analysis conducted in this paper revealed that it is possible to downsize the current number of physicians by an average of 28%, and the number of nurses by about 55% while maintaining emergency services around the hour. The results could be translated into lower operating expenses of the ER, and better utilization of staff resources in other parts of the hospital.

Suggested Citation

  • Sabah M. Al-Najjar & Samir Hussain Ali, 2011. "Staffing and Scheduling Emergency Rooms in Two Public Hospitals: A Case Study," International Journal of Business Administration, International Journal of Business Administration, Sciedu Press, vol. 2(2), pages 137-148, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:jfr:ijba11:v:2:y:2011:i:2:p:137-148
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciedu.ca/journal/index.php/ijba/article/view/235/128
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://www.sciedu.ca/journal/index.php/ijba/article/view/235
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Vandankumar M. Trivedi & D. Michael Warner, 1976. "A Branch and Bound Algorithm for Optimum Allocation of Float Nurses," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 22(9), pages 972-981, May.
    2. D. Michael Warner & Juan Prawda, 1972. "A Mathematical Programming Model for Scheduling Nursing Personnel in a Hospital," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 19(4-Part-1), pages 411-422, December.
    3. Rosenbloom, E. S. & Goertzen, N. F., 1987. "Cyclic nurse scheduling," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 19-23, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Erhard, Melanie & Schoenfelder, Jan & Fügener, Andreas & Brunner, Jens O., 2018. "State of the art in physician scheduling," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 265(1), pages 1-18.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Wright, P. Daniel & Mahar, Stephen, 2013. "Centralized nurse scheduling to simultaneously improve schedule cost and nurse satisfaction," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 41(6), pages 1042-1052.
    2. Dellaert, Nico & Jeunet, Jully & Mincsovics, Gergely, 2011. "Budget allocation for permanent and contingent capacity under stochastic demand," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 131(1), pages 128-138, May.
    3. Venkataraman, R. & Brusco, M. J., 1996. "An integrated analysis of nurse staffing and scheduling policies," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 24(1), pages 57-71, February.
    4. Cheang, B. & Li, H. & Lim, A. & Rodrigues, B., 2003. "Nurse rostering problems--a bibliographic survey," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 151(3), pages 447-460, December.
    5. Campbell, Gerard M. & Diaby, Moustapha, 2002. "Development and evaluation of an assignment heuristic for allocating cross-trained workers," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 138(1), pages 9-20, April.
    6. Maenhout, Broos & Vanhoucke, Mario, 2013. "An integrated nurse staffing and scheduling analysis for longer-term nursing staff allocation problems," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 485-499.
    7. Brusco, Michael J., 2015. "A bicriterion algorithm for the allocation of cross-trained workers based on operational and human resource objectives," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 247(1), pages 46-59.
    8. Li, L. X. & Benton, W. C., 1996. "Performance measurement criteria in health care organizations: Review and future research directions," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 93(3), pages 449-468, September.
    9. Li, Ling & Benton, W. C., 2003. "Hospital capacity management decisions: Emphasis on cost control and quality enhancement," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 146(3), pages 596-614, May.
    10. Gerard M. Campbell, 1999. "Cross-Utilization of Workers Whose Capabilities Differ," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 45(5), pages 722-732, May.
    11. Frederick M Howard & Catherine A Gao & Christopher Sankey, 2020. "Implementation of an automated scheduling tool improves schedule quality and resident satisfaction," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(8), pages 1-9, August.
    12. Ana Paias & Marta Mesquita & Margarida Moz & Margarida Pato, 2021. "A network flow-based algorithm for bus driver rerostering," OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V., vol. 43(2), pages 543-576, June.
    13. Vanhoucke, Mario & Maenhout, Broos, 2009. "On the characterization and generation of nurse scheduling problem instances," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 196(2), pages 457-467, July.
    14. Rajeswari Muniyan & Rajakumar Ramalingam & Sultan S. Alshamrani & Durgaprasad Gangodkar & Ankur Dumka & Rajesh Singh & Anita Gehlot & Mamoon Rashid, 2022. "Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm with Nelder–Mead Method to Solve Nurse Scheduling Problem," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 10(15), pages 1-24, July.
    15. Ali Janati & Djavad Nejad & Mehdi Ariafar & Seyyedeh Roghayyeh Mirshojaee & Mohammad Mahdavi Moghaddam & Saaied Ghodousi Nejad & Majid Ghodousi Nejad & Morteza Arab Zozani & Ali Vafaee & Elham Baghban, 2016. "Optimization of Nurse Numbers in Emergency Department of a District Hospital in a Developing Country Iran, 2014," Modern Applied Science, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 10(5), pages 1-41, May.
    16. repec:dau:papers:123456789/4010 is not listed on IDEAS
    17. Andrés Miniguano-Trujillo & Fernanda Salazar & Ramiro Torres & Patricio Arias & Koraima Sotomayor, 2021. "An integer programming model to assign patients based on mental health impact for tele-psychotherapy intervention during the Covid–19 emergency," Health Care Management Science, Springer, vol. 24(2), pages 286-304, June.
    18. Gordon H. Lewis & Ashok Srinivasan & Eswaran Subrahmanian, 1998. "Staffing and Allocation of Workers in an Administrative Office," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 44(4), pages 548-570, April.
    19. Edmund Burke & Jingpeng Li & Rong Qu, 2012. "A Pareto-based search methodology for multi-objective nurse scheduling," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 196(1), pages 91-109, July.
    20. U Aickelin & E K Burke & J Li, 2007. "An estimation of distribution algorithm with intelligent local search for rule-based nurse rostering," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 58(12), pages 1574-1585, December.
    21. Deborah L. Kellogg & Steven Walczak, 2007. "Nurse Scheduling: From Academia to Implementation or Not?," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 37(4), pages 355-369, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jfr:ijba11:v:2:y:2011:i:2:p:137-148. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jenny Zhang (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://ijba.sciedupress.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.