Rehabilitation staff scheduling in senior daytime care facility with feeling of physical/mental workloads and movements

Abstract

Demand for nursing care facilities such as senior daycares has increased in Japan because of an aging population. In these facilities, multiple staff members offer nursing care services to the elderly such as physical therapy and exercise using machines, according to a staff schedule planned manually. These staff members face some issues regarding heavy workloads, limited human resources, etc. Therefore, it is necessary to plan the staff schedules by distributing the workloads among all the staff members. Additionally, it is observed that staff members are stressed because of physical as well as mental stress when providing services since they also need to vigilant to prevent user accidents. A previous study proposed a scheduling model considering the feeling of physical and mental workloads separately. Thus, the differences for either of the workloads may become very large in planned schedules. This study proposes a scheduling model considering both physical and mental workloads, and produces a balancing schedule considering both types of workloads simultaneously. Additionally, the impact of a movement constraint that is added to the model to reduce the inefficient movement of staff is also discussed. Lastly, to analyze actual cases of the surveyed facility, we conducted numerical experiments with practical scenarios such as increasing the number of staff members, and changing the staff role according to actual staff shifts in the facility.