Enhancing Nursing Staffing Forecasting With Safety Stock Over Lead Time Modeling

Nursing Administration Quarterly
Douglas S McNair

Abstract

In balancing competing priorities, it is essential that nursing staffing provide enough nurses to safely and effectively care for the patients. Mathematical models to predict optimal "safety stocks" have been routine in supply chain management for many years but have up to now not been applied in nursing workforce management. There are various aspects that exhibit similarities between the 2 disciplines, such as an evolving demand forecast according to acuity and the fact that provisioning "stock" to meet demand in a future period has nonzero variable lead time. Under assumptions about the forecasts (eg, the demand process is well fit as an autoregressive process) and about the labor supply process (≥1 shifts' lead time), we show that safety stock over lead time for such systems is effectively equivalent to the corresponding well-studied problem for systems with stationary demand bounds and base stock policies. Hence, we can apply existing models from supply chain analytics to find the optimal safety levels of nurse staffing. We use a case study with real data to demonstrate that there are significant benefits from the inclusion of the forecast process when determining the optimal safety stocks.

References

Sep 23, 2003·The Journal of Nursing Administration·Thitinut Sasichay-AkkadechanuntAbbas F Jawad
May 2, 2007·Policy, Politics & Nursing Practice·Valda V UpenieksMyha J Ngo
Sep 17, 2008·Nursing Research·Sung-Hyun ChoJaiyong Kim
May 18, 2010·Critical Care Medicine·Daleen Aragon Penoyer
Jul 31, 2013·Health Economics·Elizabeth L Munnich
Mar 19, 2014·International Journal of Nursing Studies·Elizabeth WestColin Sanderson

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Citations

Apr 18, 2018·Australian Health Review : a Publication of the Australian Hospital Association·Richard OlleyHelen Cooper

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