Dynamic scheduling based inpatient nursing support: applicability evaluation by laboratory experiments

In the changing nursing environment, nurses frequently encounter interruptions while performing nursing care. This phenomenon creates prolonging nurses' work hours and particularly makes an impact on novice nurses. In our previous study, a dynamic scheduling method was proposed to support inpatient nursing on the execution order of nursing activities. Furthermore, it is evaluated to be effective through several simulated problems. In actual, the inpatient nursing is complex for the random occurrence of undetermined events like patient calls and variation of processing times for nursing. It limits the validation of practical applicability of the proposed method. The purpose of this study is to verify the dynamic scheduling system for nurses' care working in acute. In this study, through a set of laboratory experiments, we evaluate the applicability of the dynamic scheduling system by comparing its instructed cares with those based on nurses' own action rules. As a result, the proposed dynamic scheduling system provided higher quality care, and thus its applicability to practical nurses' work environments is confirmed.