Loading...

A Mathematical Model for Providing Home Care Services by Hospital During COVID-19 Pandemic

Pourbaferani, Mohaddeseh | 2021

238 Viewed
  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 54844 (01)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Industrial Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Eshghi, Kourosh
  7. Abstract:
  8. In this study, providing home care services by hospitals in the epidemic situations such as COVID-19 is proposed for the first time. Moreover, a mathematical formulation is developed to provide simultaneous decision-making about serving patients without COVID-19, scheduling nurses in the non-COVID-19 wards of hospitals, and scheduling and routing for nurses to serve patients at home. This problem aims to develop essential compatibilities to keep people safe and help continue vital healthcare services during the COVID-19 and similar pandemics. Accordingly, nurses' preferences, the number of available hospital beds, the patient-to-nurse ratio, the Unavailability of some nurses due to COVID-19, and the definition of the limit for the number of assigned shifts are considered. The goal is to minimize the total salary and overtime pay of the nurses, the cost of patients' hospitalization, the cost of nurses' commute to patients' houses, the penalty for the patients that could not be served due to the lack of resources, the penalty for violating the patient-to-nurse ratio, and the penalty for assigning undesirable shifts to nurses. Since the proposed problem is NP-hard, a Memetic Algorithm (MA) with parameters tuned by the Taguchi method is used to solve this integrated model on large-scale problems efficiently. Finally, by testing the model on tests problems, the efficiency of the model and the good performance of the proposed meta-heuristic algorithm are shown. Reduce hospital costs, less dependence on hospital beds to provide services and increased patient coverage are shown that the policy of providing home care services by a hospital in cases of pandemic conditions can be given special attention.

  9. Keywords:
  10. Nurses Scheduling Problem ; COVID-19 ; Memetic Algorithm ; Home Health Care ; Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling ; NP-Hard Problems ; Pandemic

 Digital Object List

 Bookmark

No TOC