In 2009, public hospital’s leadership asked GlobalHealth Lab to assess workloads of its clinical staff and suggest staffing structure improvements to address chronic complaints of overwork. An MIT student team developed a model to evaluate staffing needs in the hospital’s maternity ward through extensive nurse shadowing, process flow mapping, site observations, and staff interviews. The students discovered that a lack of essential medical equipment, rather than nurse understaffing, was constraining patient flow. Optimum nurse staffing levels could not be determined without adequate equipment. The students created a model to calculate the utilization rates of nurses on a regular basis to inform scheduling and hiring and provided recommendations for broader process improvements that would enhance record keeping and integrate cost analysis into regular decision-making practices. After the students left, Warmbaths continued to collect patient flow data in order to inform staffing decisions and day-to-day operation. Financial constraints meant that the hospital would have to wait to obtain needed medical equipment that students suggested would remove bottlenecks in the labor and delivery ward.

 

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