Analyzing the nursing organizational structure and process from a scheduling perspective.

The efficient and effective management of nursing personnel is of critical importance in a hospital's environment comprising approximately 25 % of the hospital's operational costs. The nurse organizational structure and the organizational processes highly affect the nurses' working conditions and the provided quality of care. In this paper, we investigate the impact of different nurse organization structures and different organizational processes for a real-life situation in a Belgian university hospital. In order to make accurate nurse staffing decisions, the employed solution methodology incorporates shift scheduling characteristics in order to overcome the deficiencies of the many phase-specific methodologies that are proposed in the academic literature.