Managerial implications of calculating optimal nurse staffing in medical units

A critical managerial decision in health care organizations is the staffing decision. We offer a model to derive an optimum mix of different staff categories that minimizes total cost subject to constraints imposed by the patient acuity system and minimum staffing policies in a medical unit of Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, Alaska. We also indicate several managerial implications on how our results and their sensitivity analyses can be used effectively in decision making in a variety of categories.