The paper suggests a staffing tool to improve efficiency at a nursing department of a local hospital. The managers consider they are understaffed and try to overwhelm the staffing deficit problem through overtime, rather than hiring additional nurses. The estimates indicate that the shortage at the hospital level corresponds to 300 full time equivalent (FTE) nurses. However, the huge amount of ...

The use of extended work shifts and overtime has escalated as hospitals cope with a shortage of registered nurses (RNs). Little is known, however, about the prevalence of these extended work periods and their effects on patient safety. Logbooks completed by 393 hospital staff nurses revealed that participants usually worked longer than scheduled and that approximately 40 percent of the 5,317 wo...

The challenge of balancing the interests of patients with those of healthcare providers is increased when patients fail to show up for scheduled appointments. Overbooking appointments mitigates the lost productivity caused by no-shows but increases patient wait time and provider overtime. In this paper, simulation analysis is used to develop and test the performance of scheduling rules that are...

Three recent reports, including one in this issue of Cell, reveal that the circadian regulator CRY is targeted for degradation by the F box E3 ubiquitin ligase FBXL3 (Siepka et al., 2007; Busino et al., 2007; Godinho et al., 2007). These studies confirm the importance of targeted protein degradation as a key design feature of the mammalian circadian clock.

The English author, whose most widely read works include the children’s series ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, seems to have recognized the danger of work more than half a century ago. Supporting evidence appears in the study of Virtanen et al. This is a study from the Whitehall II project examining the association between overtime work and incident coronary heart disease as assessed by the inciden...