Dynamic Nurse Staffing for Better Accompanying Services in Outpatient Departments: Insight from West China Hospital

Background: Over the past decade, the demand for accompanying services, which can be provided by both professional nurses and unskilled workers in major general hospitals, escalates significantly. Although nurses can provide higher value accompanying services to outpatients, their accompanying service capacity is limited and time-varied, which calls for the optimization of dynamic nurse staffing, an issue rarely addressed in the literature. Objective: To fill the gap, this study proposes a multi-period planning model for dynamically managing the staffing of nurses and workers for better delivering accompanying services in outpatient departments. Method: This model considers the dynamic arrival of various types of outpatients over a planning horizon and the coordination between nurses and workers in providing accompanying services with a goal of maximizing the value of accompanying services created for outpatients. Several comparison cases are investigated to highlight the benefits of our dynamic nurse staffing model. Result and Conclusion: With a case study on the outpatient department of West China Hospital, a representative large-scale general hospital in China, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and generate managerial insights, which emphasize the dynamic and integral management of the staffing of nurses and workers to provide better accompanying services.