Analysis of a patient-nurse assignment policy in home care services

This paper deals with the problem of assigning a Home Care (HC) patient to an operator among a set of possible ones, under the constraint of continuity of care. Starting from a previously proposed assignment policy, we first compare the policy with that implemented in real organizations and then we derive some rules to choose the reference operator that will be in charge to deliver the care service to a new admitted patient. The proposed assignment rules take into account the variability of the patient needs, expressed in terms of the number of visits requested along the time. The comparison of the approach with the current practice of assigning the patient to the operator with the highest expected free capacity shows that cost savings and workload balancing can be reached by including patient and workload variabilities.