A simple policy for the nurse-patient assignment in home care services

This paper deals with the problem of assigning a Home Care (HC) patient to an operator, among a set of possible ones, under the constraint of continuity of care. To balance the workload among the operators, HC providers usually adopt an approach based on the difference between the operator capacity and his/her mean workload. In this paper, we propose a policy to assign a new admitted patient to the operator with the lowest cost increment, by taking into account or not the variability of patient demand. The comparison of the policy with the current practice of assigning the patient to the operator with the highest free capacity shows that savings can be reached by implementing the proposed policy.