Domiciliary Care Scheduling

Domiciliary care is a fast-growing sector of the Healthcare market due to ageing trends in the population and the increasing tendency to provide care for elderly patients in the home rather than in the hospital. The provision of this care is now big business with several companies offering a range of services.

Ensuring the delivery of appropriate care is a complex task. Different patients require a range of different services, ranging from cooking meals to administering medication. These services have to be performed by care staff with a range fo different skills and qualifications. Compatibility of care staff with patients and continuity of care are also important measures of the quality of service provided.

We carried out industrial consultancy to apply computational intelligence techniques to assist domiciliary care managers in the task of scheduling care activities. We collaborated with Technology Managers Ltd., a software company specialising in providing support for domiciliary care. The aim was to develop intelligent software to automatically allocate domiciliary care workers to particular shifts subject to a range of hard and soft operational constraints.

As a result of the project, an intelligent scheduling component, the AutoScheduler, was successfully implemented and distributed with the company's TeleScheduler system. This is now in daily use by domiciliary care providers across the UK.

Funding

• This was research consultancy funded by Technology Managers Ltd.

Research Team:

• John McCall
• Deryck Brown