Taking care of clients and careworkers in residential care and home care
PhD candidate: Pauline Fonteijn
This PhD project is part of the projects Ontzorgen in de VVT and RegioRoster:
Ontzorgen in de VVT
Ontzorgen in de VVT is a research project focusing on dealing with demographic changes in the Netherlands. As the growing population of elderly is putting pressure on the Dutch Home Care and Residential Care (HCRC) setting, efficient planning practices are needed. To formulate the mathematical model of this Home Care Scheduling Problem (HCSP), we first identified the requirements of the three main stakeholders: the clients, the employees, and the organization. The model was developed and refined with practitioners and evaluated in two Dutch HCRC organizations, considering quality of care and employee well-being. This real-world validation shows how preference-aware optimization allows home care organizations to make improved and informed decisions in a pressured work environment.
As the elderly are living at home longer, a larger number of clients require care products in their own homes. Therefore, care product suppliers need to adjust their current B2B delivery system to a B2C system. Ontzorgen is investigating how this transition can be reached, by providing a concept for including deliveries in the home care scheduling model.
RegioRoster
As employee shortages are rising in the Dutch Home Care and Residential Care (HCRC) setting, job satisfaction and employee retention have become even more important. Because group-level preferences included in the Collaborative Labour Agreements often fail to capture all needs of individual employees, RegioRoster focuses on eliciting all individual employee preferences first. These preferences are then included into an employee scheduling model which considers employee’s personal needs. By collaborating closely with HCRC organizations across the Netherlands, this project builds a foundation for regional collaboration and ensures results apply in operational settings.
