Development of Medical Task Classification for Job Scheduling

Abstract

To assure security and reliability for medical services under the conditions of limited financial and human-resources, it is important to develop a quantitative method for adequate scheduling of each medical task provided by medical staff. In this paper, we developed a task classification system for medical staff from the view-point of job scheduling and applied it to actual clinical nursing time-motion study data. Based on the interview data from the three trained nurses working in a surgical ward, four scheduling points were drawn by ethnomethodological word mining ; [indispensability], [expectation], [laborforce for operation], and [time dependency]. The time-motion study data of one nurse working in a surgical ward during the daytime was analyzed from this point of view ; the nurse was in charge of five patients including one patient scheduled for surgery. The results were : (1) Almost all tasks related to major demand (e.g.,, transfer of patient to the operating room) with high indispensability and expectation, and time dependency ; (2) Required much time to complete the task (e.g., time required to transport the patient to the operating room), or were jobs with low time dependency that were selectively carried out ; (3) Required answering a nurse-call or telephone, which was classified into a task with high time dependency. In the analysis, some jobs were arranged in the order of inefficiency, contrary to the scheduling classification. The classification showed good consistency with the clinical decisions on scheduling nursing services, and the results explained well the way of scheduling nurse's duties.