Application of telematics for improving multiple schedules

Nurse scheduling is an important, but also a very complicated management task. Performing this task results in a nursing schedule. These nursing schedules strongly influence the performance of a nursing ward. This paper describes research results on the application of several knowledge acquisition techniques for the development of a decision support system. This system informs the nurse scheduler about the quality of an arranged schedule. This paper next shows how this system can be used to improve multiple schedules in combination with the application of telematics. This improvement is based on the communication between schedulers who have a shortage or a surplus of nurses at certain days of the schedule. By means of internal reallocation of nurses for a short period of time, the total schedule quality of all nursing schedules can be improved.