Abstract
Abstract The planning of homecare services is a complex process that involves: 1) allocating personnel among shifts, 2) assigning staff members to patients, 3) routing staff visits and 4) scheduling treatments while considering, for example, required competences, patient and caregiver preferences, labour laws, union regulations, organisational policies and temporal precedence of activities within a limited budget. Homecare planning is primarily done manually even though optimisation techniques have aided in solving similar problems in other domains. Efficient homecare planning requires optimisation techniques and optimised homecare can deliver significant savings for municipalities, regions and hospitals. From the patient’s perspective, higher-quality homecare services provide higher living standards. Improved service quality results in better treatments (assignment of staff members with the appropriate competences), higher continuity of care (less rotation of staff members for the same patient) and fulfilment of patient preferences. More efficient homecare services allow treating more patients at home, which patients indicate is their preferred place of care. However, homecare planning is still mostly performed manually. Researchers need to address the integrated optimisation problem to obtain efficient, global solutions. Existing research has focused on planning on the operational level, but attention also needs to be placed on the strategic and tactical levels.
