A Development of a Computerized Cyclical Scheduling System for Nurses

Abstract

An efficient computer-based nursing scheduling module has been developed in order to facilitate nursing duty management throughout hospital wards. Manual maintenance of a nursing schedule has been known to be a formidable task because ward nursing must be maintained around the clock with limited number of personnel to manage three regular shifts (day, evening, and night) as well as off duties. The nursing scheduler has been integrated as a functional component of the hospital information system via order communication system, which can transfer relevant nursing information to and from other related modules such as administrative or payroll department. The implementation based on cyclical scheduling provides capability of even distribution of nurses and predictability of each member's plan on a weekly basis, which eliminates redundant manual scheduling at every management cycle. The LAN interconnected hospital information system incorporates client-server technology, where UNISYS U6000 used as a server, PCS as clients, INGRES for DBMS, and C and VISION programming languages running under UNIX operating system. The prototype implementation used preliminary data collected from a tertiary care hospital nursing department. The data include work shift patterns, classified nursing groups, and principles of work schedule. The scheduling programs are designed to enter/store/update information about the duty nurses, to create worklist, to manage duty time table, and to print out scheduling report. The initial results indicate that the scheduling module is easy to learn, convenient to use, and flexible to adapt to numerous nursing requirements.