A data-driven, care-centric approach to nurse staffing

Nurse managers often allocate excessive non-productive time during schedule creation, resulting in overtime & understaffing issues. Discussions with nursing leaders revealed a lack of understanding of how much non-patient care time could be utilized during the scheduling process while preserving the resources needed for patient care. To optimize resource allocation when creating nursing schedules, a simple mathematical modeling approach that considers required patient care resources & various factors that prevent employees from participating in patient care, including orientation, leave, & other scenarios, can determine the maximum amount of replacement (non-productive) time that can be scheduled each week while ensuring the necessary resources for patient care are preserved. This approach can help nurse managers make more informed scheduling decisions, maximize resource utilization & deepen the understanding of their budget. Leveraging care-centric modeling and the expertise of informatics nurses can help to facilitate increased communication and collaboration between nursing and finance. Supporting blog post and references can be found at https://informaticsnurse.com/solve-nurse-understaffing-with-a-data-driven-care-centric-approach