Sustainable Urban Homecare Delivery with Different Means of Transport

Abstract

Abstract:Due to the increasing number of requests for homecare services, care institutions struggle to perform in urban traffic, which eventually makes travel times longer and less predictable and, therefore, leads to a declining service quality. Homecare delivery scheduling and planning tools must lead to efficient reliable routes that allow the nursing crew to make the least efforts and use the fewest institutional resources, and that consider urban sustainability goals. For the case study, a European city was selected with 58,000 people of whom 73 patients received long-term care at homes provided by 11 homecare nurses. While maximising patient satisfaction, a homecare planning algorithm considered many means of transport and minimised travel times. The study reduced the total nurses' working hours/day by a bus and walking combination, and by comparing if nurses ride e-bikes, which respectively reduced~35-44% of the total time that nurses spent travelling. This result is applicable to an urban environment where the public transport network is sufficient and biking is allowed on a reasonable number of roads. Better homecare management can support the efficient use of resources of health care institutions, high-quality home care and aspirations towards livable communities and sustainable development.

Scheduling Sustainable Homecare with Urban Transport and Different Skilled Nurses Using an Approximate Algorithm

“…Finding the shortest route between patients implies creating distance matrices and considering the city's specific urban characteristics for each transport mode [52]. Hence nurses' earliest arrival time depends not only on their average attainable speed but also on the routes they are allowed to use [23].…”

“…The data employed to develop the Results Section in the paper were provided by the Care Centre for the Elderly (CCE). In 2017 and 2018 [22,23], the authors published particular cases or simplifications of the work herein included. Those cases made a comparison among various transport systems by making patient satisfaction a priority.…”

Presented a Framework of Computational Modeling to Identify the Patient Admission Scheduling Problem in the Healthcare System

“…Over the last few decades, outpatient appointment scheduling has piqued the interest of various academics and clinicians, starting with the work of Welch and Bailey [13]. In recent decades, the literature has properly covered appointment scheduling, including outpatient scheduling [14], operation room scheduling [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], and medical examination scheduling [25][26][27][28][29]. Te primary issues with appointment scheduling are connected to optimizing healthcare resources through better usage of human resources and medical equipment, which results in shorter patient wait times.…”

“…Control. Production planning was defned by Szander et al [25] and improved by Stamps et al [26]. Te fve hierarchical phases of resource capacity management as proposed by Vissers et al are strategy development, patient volume planning and control, resource planning and control, patient group planning and control, and patient planning and control.…”

Registered nurses’ experiences of information technology use in home health care - from a sustainable development perspective

“…Coordination between care and resource efficiency is important and can be done, for example, with IT support and e-services, information systems, models and system components. Better home care management can support the efficient use of resources of health care institutions, producing high-quality HHC [ 9 ]. There is a wealth of information that supports the notion of sustainable development, but there is little evidence of sustainable models of care for older people and of collaboration in their application.…”