Analyzing the Nursing Organizational Structure and Process from a Scheduling Perspective

The efficient and effective management of nursing personnel is of critical importance in a hospital’s environment comprising a vast share of the hospital’s operational costs. The nurse organizational structure and the organizational processes highly affect the nurses’ working conditions and the provided quality of care. In this paper, we investigate the impact of different nurse organization structures and a different organizational process, which simultaneously integrates the nurse staffing and shift scheduling decision, on the quality of care on a real-life situation in a Belgian university hospital.