Final year projects (Baccalaureus Theses) (Industrial Engineering)

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Browsing Final year projects (Baccalaureus Theses) (Industrial Engineering) by Author "Friedrich, Sonja"

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    Designing a decision support tool for nurse scheduling at Stellenbosch Hospital
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2011-12) Friedrich, Sonja; Van Dyk, L.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Industrial Engineering.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Providing sufficient healthcare to all South African citizens is of significant concern to government. Major problem areas lie in the prevention and control of epidemics, allocation of resources and health systems management. The majority of the government facilitated hospitals in South Africa experience difficulty in attaining health care targets due to these problems. Stellenbosch Hospital, an 85- bed, non-profit public facility that serves a community of 170 000 people, is no exception. A root cause analysis revealed that an insufficient nurse scheduling process is the underlying cause of numerous problems and that a lack of worker morale is the largest predicament at Stellenbosch Hospital. Different motivational theories are investigated and it is concluded that worker morale at the hospital can be improved by empowering nurses to gain more control over schedules, and that the nurse scheduling process can be enhanced by supporting nurse scheduling with a decision support tool. The purpose of the decision support tool is scoped to deal with day and night scheduling and nurse-to-ward assignments particularly, as this is largest amount of work for the unit managers. Additionally it is decided to involve nurses in the annual day and night schedule as well as the ward preferences, as this has the most significant impact on nurses’ work lives. The inputs and expected outcomes of the decision support tool are discussed and the development platform was chosen to be a combination of Visual Basics and Microsoft Excel, as these programs are powerful and freely available. After careful consideration of different nurse scheduling methods linear programming and a self-developed algorithm were chosen by making use of the Analytical Hierarchy Process. The day and night schedule is solved with an integer programming model, with the drawback being the inflexibility of the fixed quarters which nurses can select, as well as the rigidity of the model and the suboptimal solution which needs rounding. The day and night scheduling results are an input to the self-developed algorithm, which imitates the thought process of the unit managers scheduling process to arrive at a feasible solution. The key to this method is the nurses available over nurses required ratio which drives the algorithm. A flowchart supporting the documentation and understanding of the code has been developed along with a testing table to verify the results of the code.