經驗法則式護理人員Excel排班系統之開發

Nursing scheduling has been a very critical and time-consuming human resource management responsibility for head nurse. This task becomes even challenging because of nurses' rising consciousness of their own rights and their requests to get involved during the scheduling process. Though there have been studies in nursing scheduling, it seems that clinically practical support tool has not been matured yet. This paper was to report such a nurse-self-made, heuristic-based nursing scheduling support system.
A Pediatric ICU unit, staffed with 35 nurses, of a medical center in Taipei was used for this study. A survey for the preferred scheduling principles was taken form all nurses to decide the scheduling heuristics, which were then encoded on Excel 2000 with VBA. The program was developed by a nurse who was trained with VBA programming and familiar with the problems of scheduling. The monthly scheduling plans by the old and new approach were compared in terms of their meeting with nurses' preferred scheduling principles.
There support system was composed of five functions: setting for personal scheduling requests, auto-scheduling, shift modification, report printing and inquiry. The results showed that the system could complete around 96% of shifts. Another 4% could still be easily done manually in less than half hour. Compared to, averagely, 4-5 hours were needed in the past for an experienced head nurse to finish the scheduling plan, the system performance is satisfying. More importantly, the system generated monthly plan could well meet nurses' personal expectations. Furthermore, the system could provide many scheduling statistics to support advanced nursing human resources management.