Health Scores for Generating Health-Respecting Shift Plans by Means of an Expert System from the Perspective of Care Organisations

The care section is an essential part of our society as well as our everyday life. It is also a section which suffers from staff shortage. Even though the job itself is not the problem, the shortage is related to shift-related below-average working conditions. This work focuses on health-related aspects of shift planning in order to provide insights which can assist in improving the situation of care workers. To this end, a literature and law analysis was followed by interviews to collect, aggregate and extend health-related rules for the shift planning process. A list of derived rules from practice is presented in addition to a discussion of previous insights from literature. Based on these rules, a publicly available software demonstrator was implemented for sensitisation and to show how a health-focused shift plan generation could look like. The basis for shift plan evaluation is a health score definition, which takes into account the number of shifts and weighted rule violations. The demonstrator was also used on shift plan data covering several years, resulting in insights about rule violations from practice.