IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/tjorxx/v72y2021i8p1808-1821.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Mouna Marzouk
  • Hichem Kamoun

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Mouna Marzouk & Hichem Kamoun, 2021. "Nurse to patient assignment through an analogy with the bin packing problem: Case of a Tunisian hospital," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 72(8), pages 1808-1821, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:tjorxx:v:72:y:2021:i:8:p:1808-1821
    DOI: 10.1080/01605682.2020.1727300
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01605682.2020.1727300
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01605682.2020.1727300?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:tjorxx:v:72:y:2021:i:8:p:1808-1821. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/tjor .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.