Balancing nurses' workload to enhance the quality of care in an outpatient cancer clinic Online publication date: Thu, 09-Oct-2014
by Anali Huggins; Md Mahmudur Rahman; David Claudio; Linda M. Torma
International Journal of Collaborative Enterprise (IJCENT), Vol. 4, No. 1/2, 2014
Abstract: Nurses are critical resources as they maintain communication with patients, providers, and all other departments. Therefore, nurse unavailability creates a gap in the care delivery process and contributes to patients' wait time. This paper presents a methodology aimed at balancing nursing workload and increasing nurse availability at a workstation through an equitable redistribution of activities taking into consideration nurse utilisation and mental demand as well as required cognitive skills. A work-sampling study was performed to determine the proportion of time nurses spent on each task and the availability of nurses at the workstation. Subsequently, NASA-TLX and a cognitive survey were administered to understand the nature of activities and estimated task demands and requirements of nurses. Based on the results, recommendations were proposed and verified through a pilot study which resulted in an increase of nurses' availability by 19% while balancing their workload.
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