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3367. An indirect time study for nursing tasks in Belgian hospitals: methodological aspects and optimal sampling

Invited abstract in session TD-15: Nurse rostering, stream OR in Health Services (ORAHS).

Tuesday, 14:30-16:00
Room: 18 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Stijn De Vuyst
Industrial Systems Engineering and Product Design, Ghent University
2. Kurt De Cock
Industrial Systems Engineering and Product Design, Ghent University
3. Dieter Claeys
Industrial Systems Engineering and Product Design, Ghent University

Abstract

In this presentation we report on a large-scale time study to estimate the expected duration of a set of common nursing tasks in 25 Belgian hospitals involving over 600 nurses. A direct time measurement by starting and stopping a timer at the beginning and end of every executed task proved to be too invasive and complicated if done by the nurse itself and too expensive if done by an outside expert. We therefore used an indirect method by equipping each nurse with a smart phone running an application that beeps at irregular time intervals. After every beep, within a time-out interval, the nurse registers what task type she was executing. In addition, after the nurse's work shift is finished, she is presented with a list of 10 task types and asked to tally how many tasks of each type were executed during the shift. For a certain task type, the beeps allow us to estimate the fraction of time a nurse spends on tasks of this type, while the tallies estimate their rate, i.e. how many tasks of this type occur per time unit. The ratio of the fraction and rate is the expected duration.

We provide approximations of the bias and the variance of the resulting estimator using the Delta method leading to reliable confidence intervals and optimal strategies for deciding which task types to tally in future nurse shifts. In addition, we investigate the quality of our approximation by comparing to Monte Carlo simulations.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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