Nurse to patient assignment through an analogy with the bin packing problem: Case of a Tunisian hospital

Abstract

We describe the nurse to patient assignment problem that supports the operational decisions in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of Hedi Chaker Hospital. It implies efficiently assigning patients to nurses in their suitable unit of work, taking into consideration during assignment a set of patients having a given acuity to a set of nurses having certain capacities. A binary linear integer programming problem is formulated where each patient can be treated by an only one nurse. Due to the combinatorial complexity of the problem, a heuristic approach is developed to achieve the procedure of assignment. The Max–Max assignment heuristic is based on the development of four mathematical propositions that serve for insuring the problem size reduction. The resolution of the problem via the heuristic method has shown its pertinence for exact resolution using real instances extracted from the unit. For our real case the heuristic provided flexible modelling and gave a feasible and a good nurse to patient assignment for every shift and in each zone of assignment.

Keywords:

• Nurse to patient assignment problem
• mathematical proposition
• size reduction
• heuristic method

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).