Measurement and description of nursing-care service process

Abstract

Employees at nursing-care facilities co-operate with each other and provide nursing-care service according to care plans designed to meet residents’ physical condition and needs. Traditionally, improvement of service productivity in nursing-care service has been based on experience and inspiration of managers and employees. Engineering methods to achieve improvement is a relatively new and necessary approach. In this paper, the authors collaborated with eight nursing-care facilities, and developed engineering methods to achieve improvement of their service process and service productivity. At first, we classified employees’ behaviors into a three-layer structure consisting of “service type”, “purpose / situation” and “operation”, and developed task classification for nursing-care service which could express 455 employees’ states. We then described nursing-care service process as transition of employees’ state with eight properties; “id”, “start time”, “end time”, “task”, “place”, “target resident”, “cost” and “detailed information”. Finally, we measured behaviors of 20 employees at four nursing-care facilities to evaluate the task classification for nursing-care service proposed in this paper, and confirmed that it covered 96.9 % of their behaviors. The cover rate was enough high for visualization of nursing-care service process. In addition, we visualized the nursing-care service process of 15 employees at a nursing-care facility with “time-line mode” and “statistical mode”. We also confirmed that our proposed methods were effective to visualize the nursing-care service process and to improve service productivity in the service field.

Keywords

• service engineering
• nursing-care service
• service process
• task classification
• state transition