A task analysis of hand written nurse scheduling for the development of a computerized support system

Abstract

Scheduling nurses to staff shifts is usually made by a head or chief nurse manually in Japan. The main difficulty of this scheduling is ensuring a certain level of service and skill, in every shift, is maintained while balancing the workload among the nurses involved. As a result it is usually impossible to develop a schedule which satisfies all the requirements, in spite of the time and resources spent in the effort. Although many computer support systems for nurse scheduling have been developed, they are usually considered difficult to use and ineffective. Our goal is to develop a useful computer support system for nurse scheduling. In this paper, first we surveyed existing support system and discussed why they were not used. Second, we performed task analysis for manual scheduling by a chief nurse in a hospital. In this analysis, we used “thinking aloud method” which is verbalizing what she is thinking as well as why she is doing what she is doing. As a result of this analysis, we found some functions for a useful system which enables a head or chief nurse to devote herself to scheduling without needing a prior knowledge of operating computers.