Improving Perceived Fairness of Task Assignments in Cardiovascular Intensive Nursing Care Unit with Simple Queuing Mechanism

Abstract

In this work, a simple computer application is proposed to improve the perceived fairness of Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit (CVICU) nursing team in hospitals. The proposed system called Intensive care Unit (ICU) Task Assignment Platform (ICU-TAP) is aimed to increase perceived fairness and satisfaction through a systematic but flexible scheduling method. The solution proposed here takes into account the skill preference of each nurse to ensure an equal opportunity to maintain career goals, with an aim to increasing job satisfaction. The system is designed based on the basic concept of queuing. ICU-TAP equally distributes the harder and monotonic tasks among nurses and takes into account the desired skill of each nurse for more frequent assignment of other tasks. The proposed system is expected to make the workflow of the unit traceable, resulting in paperless scheduling, and reducing discrepancies between scheduling and daily task assignment of the nursing unit.