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FrancoAngeli Journals

Saggi

No. 126 (2023)

Staffing needs methodologies in healthcare management: A review of the international literature

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/mesa2023-126oa17289
Submitted
febbraio 16, 2024
Published
2024-04-24

Abstract

Many health care systems around the world are not new to efforts aimed at defining efficient algorithms for estimating staffing needs across professions and settings because this is consequential for the quantity and quality of services provided. A fully-fledged understanding of the methodologies adopted at the international level to estimate staffing needs in healthcare management seems pivotal to complement related attempts at the Italian national level, where this endeavor is currently very prominent. This paper, therefore, investigates whether a gold standard is commonly used to set staffing needs for health professions or, alternatively, it aims at identifying the set of variables that tends to be recurring across different models.
A combination of an explorative and a systematic review of 69 articles reveal that a unique algorithm dos does not exist.
Most algorithms account for such variables as the current production of services and the historical development trends in the quantity of the workforce, whereas only a minority considers organizational models. The article discusses management implications for the improvement of the definition of staffing needs methodologies in the Italian healthcare sector.

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