Allocation of nursing personnel in an extended care facility.

A model of the assignment of direct-care tasks to nursing personnel, based on nurses' concepts of effective personnel use, is described. Using an ordinal scale of perceived effectiveness, the model generates daily task assignments indistinguishable from or superior to those used by nursing team leaders. A modification of the model has potential use in long-range planning of personnel needs, allowing comparison of alternative staffing patterns by their relative effectiveness profiles and facilitating cost/effectiveness comparisons.