Optimizing Customer Routes with Constraint
- This article presents the Geriatric Emergency Management-Falls Intervention Team (GEM-FIT) project. It shows how a collaborative nurse lead project can be implemented and used to improve collaboration and interdisciplinary teamwork, as well as improve the delivery of health care services. This resource is likely more useful to nurses as a resource for strategies and models for assembling and participating in an interdisciplinary team than for specific fall-prevention strategies. It is suggested that this resource be reviewed prior to creating an interdisciplinary team for a collaborative project in a health care setting.
Additionally, be sure that your plan addresses the following, which corresponds to the grading criteria in the scoring guide. Please study the scoring guide carefully so you understand what is needed for a distinguished score.
- Identify necessary resources to support the implementation and continued sustainability of a safety improvement initiative pertaining to a specific patient safety issue.
- Analyze the usefulness of resources to the role group responsible for implementing quality and safety improvements focusing on a specific patient safety issue.
- Analyze the value of resources to reduce patient safety risk related to a specific patient safety issue.
- Present reasons and relevant situations for use of resource tool kit by its target audience.
- Communicate in a clear, logically structured, and professional manner that applies current APA style and formatting.
Example Assessment: You may use the following example to give you an idea of what a Proficient or higher rating on the scoring guide would look like but keep in mind that your tool kit will focus on promoting safety with medication administration. Note that you do not have to submit your bibliography in addition to the Google Site; the example bibliography is merely for your reference.
To submit your online tool kit assessment, paste the link to your Google Site in the assessment submission box.Example Google Site: You may use the example found on the Assessment 4: Google Sitesreading list, Resources for Improved Heparin Infusion Safety, to give you an idea of what a Proficient or higher rating on the scoring guide would look like for this assessment but keep in mind that your tool kit will focus on promoting safety with medication administration.Note: If you experience technical or other challenges in completing this assessment, please contact your faculty member.
Competencies Measured
By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the course competencies through the following assessment scoring guide criteria:
- Competency 1: Analyze the elements of a successful quality improvement initiative.
- Analyze the usefulness of resources to the role group responsible for implementing quality and safety improvements focusing on a specific patient safety issue.
- Competency 2: Analyze factors that lead to patient safety risks.
- Analyze the value of resources to reduce patient safety risk related to a specific patient safety issue.
- Competency 3: Identify organizational interventions to promote patient safety.
- Identify necessary resources to support the implementation and continued sustainability of a safety improvement initiative pertaining to a specific patient safety issue.
- Competency 5: Apply professional, scholarly, evidence-based strategies to communicate in a manner that supports safe and effective patient care.
- Present reasons and relevant situations for resource tool kit to be used by its target audience.
- Communicate resource tool kit in a clear, logically structured, and professional manner that applies current APA style and formatting.
You are the vehicle dispatcher for a delivery service that serves a mix of ‘easy’ customers who are quite pleasant when the driver arrives and ‘hard’ customers who are difficult to manage. In order to keep the drivers happy, you never assign a driver to visit two hard customers in a row. Thus, for each driver, given a set of ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ customers to visit, your goal is to minimize the travel time to visit all customers, starting and returning from the company depot, satisfying the constraint that a hard customer visit cannot be followed by another hard customer.
This problem can be infeasible if the number of hard customers is greater than the number of easy customers. Let’s assume that this is sometimes the case. As dispatcher, you have decided to relax the constraint that a hard customer visit cannot be followed by another hard customer. Rather, you want to minimize the number of times this happens and minimize the route travel length.
- It may not be possible to minimize both terms at once; how would you find a good compromise?
- Formulate the Hard/Easy Customer Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) with the two term objective function terms. Define any new notation you introduce and explain your formulation in words and present mathematically.
- Develop a heuristic to solve the problem. Clearly present your heuristic.
- Solve the instances posted in the excel file. Solutions should include the visit sequence of nodes and the tour length and # of times a hard customer follows another hard customer for each instance. Your solution should be included on the tab “Sample solution” in the data spreadsheet.