Adaptive staffing can mitigate essential worker disease and absenteeism in an emerging epidemic
| Autor: | Patrick Kaminski, Benjamin D Zusman, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Elliot Aguilar, Ismail Uluturk, Andreas G. Zori, Nicholas J. Roberts, John W. Barlow |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
infectious disease
Health Personnel Staffing Context (language use) Health care Pandemic Absenteeism Humans Pandemics Disease burden essential workers Multidisciplinary Population Biology business.industry Applied Mathematics COVID-19 Shift Work Schedule Redistribution (cultural anthropology) Biological Sciences network model pairwise approximation Workforce Physical Sciences Quarantine Demographic economics business |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
| ISSN: | 1091-6490 0027-8424 |
| Popis: | Essential worker absenteeism has been a pressing problem in the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly 20% of US hospitals experienced staff shortages, exhausting replacement pools and at times requiring COVID-positive healthcare workers to remain at work. To our knowledge there are no data-informed models examining how different staffing strategies affect epidemic dynamics on a network in the context of rising worker absenteeism. Here we develop a susceptible–infected–quarantined-recovered adaptive network model using pair approximations to gauge the effects of worker replacement versus redistribution of work among remaining healthy workers in the early epidemic phase. Parameterized with hospital data, the model exhibits a time-varying trade-off: Worker replacement minimizes peak prevalence in the early phase, while redistribution minimizes final outbreak size. Any “ideal” strategy requires balancing the need to maintain a baseline number of workers against the desire to decrease total number infected. We show that one adaptive strategy—switching from replacement to redistribution at epidemic peak—decreases disease burden by 9.7% and nearly doubles the final fraction of healthy workers compared to pure replacement. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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