The Scheduling Game

This game was created by Matthew Lowe in 2008 as a testing and training tool for potential schedulers. It represents a thin slice of real-world home care scheduling. It covers:

• Assigning client visits to the availability of four caregivers
• Avoiding pet and smoking allergies and transfer restrictions (simplified)
• Visits that need specific training (simplified)
• Time-specific visits
• Gap management
• Overtime management

In the real world we also deal with:

• Assigning the availability of dozens of caregivers in private home care to 1000+ caregivers in government home care. (Ratio typically varies from 2-4 clients per caregiver)
• Pre-assessing the week - each day has two peaks - to find the periods with the biggest difference between the hours of care needed and the availability on hand, both over and under.
• Deciding which days of the week to schedule first (non-linear processing)
• Filling one-time changes for the current week (like this game) versus optimizing the ongoing pattern of services (much harder)
• Geography and travel time between visits - normally 15 minutes per visit is set aside for travel
• Unmatched clients and caregivers who cannot be assigned together
• Specific gender requirements for personal care or due to trauma
• Clients' visit history (in this game, unassigned visits have no history and can go to anyone without penalty)
• Extreme continuity requirements for individuals who are highly resistant to care, usually due to dementia or mental illness
• Overnight and 24 hour live-in visits
• Services that require two caregivers at once
• Plus all the idiosyncrasies of providing a person to person service that is emotionally charged and constantly changing with new, increasing, decreasing and ending client services and short absences of employees, ongoing changes to availability and ensuring work stability as employees increase or decrease.
• And more...

Because of all of the above, scheduling is the biggest problem in home care. It is hard to find compassionate people who can learn these variables, handle all the logical complexity plus the people side, and stay sane doing it for years. Schedulers are the creators of change, and change is painful. That makes them lightning rods for everything that happens: they take the pleas and complaints of every client and employee and have to find a way to balance all of their needs and some of their wants. In many home care operations, management does not understand what schedulers actually do - they do not know how to train or support them, while schedulers support everyone else.

If you made it this far and it all makes sense, congratulations - you now know more about scheduling than the majority of the people who already work in home care. And we haven't even started to touch on care plans, medications, safety, caregiver education or the business side of providing great home care in the modern world.