Workforce modelling, analysis and planning: A feasibility study in a local nursing home

Hong Kong is becoming an ageing society. The growth in the demand of residential care places, together with the increasing complexities of illnesses and varieties of procedures, result in heavy workloads and pressures of local nursing staff. In particular, nursing homes are experiencing high nursing staff turnover and continual manpower shortage. Despite the increasing demand from academic, commercial and political aspects for better healthcare resources allocation, studies conducted on nursing homes´ workforce planning are limited. Also, existing studies seldom formulate the nursing workforce planning problem or propose feasible models for practical usage. In this paper, an optimization-based nursing workforce planning model is proposed for enhancing the service capacity of local nursing homes. In order to show the feasibility, a simplified model has been solved by Excel Solver while the proposed model will be solved by other algorithms in the near-future.