My workforce industry is the acute healthcare industry. There are a multitude of issues that are navigated and addressed on a regular basis. I will speak in terms of my organization, although I have found that a lot of acute healthcare facilities are facing the same challenges.

Workforce scheduling is a huge challenge in my organization. Finding staff to fulfill the needs of each hospital unit is very difficult due to low staffing issues. This has required management and executive leadership to focus on retention and recruitment strategies.

Blending problems occur when using two or more resources to produce one or more products (Anderson et al., 2016). In my role as a manager of a Cath Lab, we do many procedures that require different resources to execute a successful outcome. For an ablation procedure, for example, we require sheaths, catheters, wires, and sometimes more to get through a successful ablation. The ablation results in charges for that procedure to the patient. In order to optimize the revenue from the procedure, it requires we optimize the expenditure of the products required to perform it.

Finally, logistics problems are a constant issue within acute healthcare facilities. This is especially so after COVID and all of the backorders for equipment that continue to plague the healthcare industry. We have initiated additional logistics positions to ensure that we are securing the product necessary to keep the hospital functional. These positions were justified because the amount to pay one additional worker to focus in each department was cheaper than the losses from not acquiring products necessary to perform procedures and surgeries.

I believe that using linear programming in production and operations management would be the best approach to dealing with these issues. Production scheduling in particular would prove very useful. Production scheduling linear programming allows managers to evaluate the production timeline in terms of the demanded requirements of the products (Anderson et al., 2016). This is while focusing on limitations related to labor capacity, storage, and production capacity while also paying attention to limiting cost (Anderson et al., 2016).

 

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