It is a well-known fact that nurses generally work in challenging circumstances. Within the South-African context, a developing country, factors such as shortages of staff, lack of training and crowded hospitals are common occurrences. Large amounts of South-African-born nurses leave the country, or even the profession, with the hope of better career opportunities. The nurses that are left behind, automatically experience more pressure as their already heavy workload increases further. Staff shortages, which is a general problem in the nursing profession, is a great contributing factor to stress, as nurses sometimes need to work outside their scope of practice. A so-called "multi-skill" setup is then created, such as the Level-Two hospital where this research was conducted, where staff members did not necessarily receive formal training to carry out the tasks that are required from them. Multi-tasking from them then results in the nurse having to divide her attention. The above mentioned circumstances cause a great deal of stress for the nurse working within this setup. The aim of this research was to explore and describe the experience of nurses working in the multi-skill setup, as well as to explore and describe the nurses' view of effective coping mechanisms within the multi-skill setup, and to suggest guidelines for enhancing the emotional well-being of the nurse within the multi-skill setup. A purposive sample was conducted according to a list of inclusion criteria. The sample constituted of registered nurses, enrolled nurses, as well as enrolled nursing assistants employed at the particular Level-Two hospital in Gauteng. Semi-structured interviews were used in order to collect the richest data possible. Each of the interviews was recorded on digital compact discs, so that it could be transcribed verbatim. Data saturation was reached after ten interviews and the researcher analyzed the data, together with an independent co-coder. Consensus was reached between the researcher and the co-coder with regards to their individual analyses. Four main categories, each with their own sub-categories, were identified and discussed together with a literature control; namely; the experience of the multi-skill setup as positive, the experience of the multi-skill setup as negative, personal coping mechanisms within the multi-skill setup, as well as suggestions for the enhancing of the emotional well-being of the nurse within the multi-skill setup. Recommendations were formulated by the researcher relating to nursing research, nursing education, as well as to nursing practice. / Thesis (M.Cur.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

It is a well-known fact that nurses generally work in challenging circumstances. Within the South-African context, a developing country, factors such as shortages of staff, lack of training and crowded hospitals are common occurrences. Large amounts of South-African-born nurses leave the country, or even the profession, with the hope of better career opportunities. The nurses that are left behind, automatically experience more pressure as their already heavy workload increases further. Staff shortages, which is a general problem in the nursing profession, is a great contributing factor to stress, as nurses sometimes need to work outside their scope of practice. A so-called "multi-skill" setup is then created, such as the Level-Two hospital where this research was conducted, where staff members did not necessarily receive formal training to carry out the tasks that are required from them. Multi-tasking from them then results in the nurse having to divide her attention. The above mentioned circumstances cause a great deal of stress for the nurse working within this setup. The aim of this research was to explore and describe the experience of nurses working in the multi-skill setup, as well as to explore and describe the nurses' view of effective coping mechanisms within the multi-skill setup, and to suggest guidelines for enhancing the emotional well-being of the nurse within the multi-skill setup. A purposive sample was conducted according to a list of inclusion criteria. The sample constituted of registered nurses, enrolled nurses, as well as enrolled nursing assistants employed at the particular Level-Two hospital in Gauteng. Semi-structured interviews were used in order to collect the richest data possible. Each of the interviews was recorded on digital compact discs, so that it could be transcribed verbatim. Data saturation was reached after ten interviews and the researcher analyzed the data, together with an independent co-coder. Consensus was reached between the researcher and the co-coder with regards to their individual analyses. Four main categories, each with their own sub-categories, were identified and discussed together with a literature control; namely; the experience of the multi-skill setup as positive, the experience of the multi-skill setup as negative, personal coping mechanisms within the multi-skill setup, as well as suggestions for the enhancing of the emotional well-being of the nurse within the multi-skill setup. Recommendations were formulated by the researcher relating to nursing research, nursing education, as well as to nursing practice. / Thesis (M.Cur.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

Le besoin croissant de réactivité dans les différents secteurs industriels face à la volatilité des marchés soulève une forte demande de la flexibilité dans leur organisation. Cette flexibilité peut être utilisée pour améliorer la robustesse du planning de référence d’un programme d’activités donné. Les ressources humaines de l’entreprise étant de plus en plus considérées comme le coeur des structures organisationnelles, elles représentent une source de flexibilité renouvelable et viable. Tout d’abord, ce travail a été mis en oeuvre pour modéliser le problème d’affectation multi-périodes des effectifs sur les activités industrielles en considérant deux dimensions de la flexibilité: L’annualisation du temps de travail, qui concerne les politiques de modulation d’horaires, individuels ou collectifs, et la polyvalence des opérateurs, qui induit une vision dynamique de leurs compétences et la nécessité de prévoir les évolutions des performances individuelles en fonction des affectations successives. La nature dynamique de l’efficacité des effectifs a été modélisée en fonction de l’apprentissage par la pratique et de la perte de compétence pendant les périodes d’interruption du travail. En conséquence, nous sommes résolument placés dans un contexte où la durée prévue des activités n’est plus déterministe, mais résulte du nombre des acteurs choisis pour les exécuter, en plus des niveaux de leur expérience. Ensuite, la recherche a été orientée pour répondre à la question : « quelle genre, ou quelle taille, de problème pose le projet que nous devons planifier? ». Par conséquent, les différentes dimensions du problème posé sont classées et analysés pour être évaluées et mesurées. Pour chaque dimension, la méthode d’évaluation la plus pertinente a été proposée : le travail a ensuite consisté à réduire les paramètres résultants en composantes principales en procédant à une analyse factorielle. En résultat, la complexité (ou la simplicité) de la recherche de solution (c’est-à-dire de l’élaboration d’un planning satisfaisant pour un problème donné) peut être évaluée. Pour ce faire, nous avons développé une plate-forme logicielle destinée à résoudre le problème et construire le planning de référence du projet avec l’affectation des ressources associées, plate-forme basée sur les algorithmes génétiques. Le modèle a été validé, et ses paramètres ont été affinés via des plans d’expériences pour garantir la meilleure performance. De plus, la robustesse de ces performances a été étudiée sur la résolution complète d’un échantillon de quatre cents projets, classés selon le nombre de leurs tâches. En raison de l’aspect dynamique de l’efficacité des opérateurs, le présent travail examine un ensemble de facteurs qui influencent le développement de leur polyvalence. Les résultats concluent logiquement qu’une entreprise en quête de flexibilité doit accepter des coûts supplémentaires pour développer la polyvalence de ses opérateurs. Afin de maîtriser ces surcoûts, le nombre des opérateurs qui suivent un programme de développement des compétences doit être optimisé, ainsi que, pour chacun d’eux, le degré de ressemblance entre les nouvelles compétences développées et les compétences initiales, ou le nombre de ces compétences complémentaires (toujours pour chacun d’eux), ainsi enfin que la façon dont les heures de travail des opérateurs doivent être réparties sur la période d’acquisition des compétences. Enfin, ce travail ouvre la porte pour la prise en compte future des facteurs humains et de la flexibilité des effectifs pendant l’élaboration d’un planning de référence. / The growing need of responsiveness for manufacturing companies facing the market volatility raises a strong demand for flexibility in their organization. This flexibility can be used to enhance the robustness of a baseline schedule for a given programme of activities. Since the company personnel are increasingly seen as the core of the organizational structures, they provide the decision-makers with a source of renewable and viable flexibility. First, this work was implemented to model the problem of multi-period workforce allocation on industrial activities with two degrees of flexibility: the annualizing of the working time, which offers opportunities of changing the schedules, individually as well as collectively. The second degree of flexibility is the versatility of operators, which induces a dynamic view of their skills and the need to predict changes in individual performances as a result of successive assignments. The dynamic nature of workforce’s experience was modelled in function of learning-by-doing and of oblivion phenomenon during the work interruption periods. We firmly set ourselves in a context where the expected durations of activities are no longer deterministic, but result from the number and levels of experience of the workers assigned to perform them. After that, the research was oriented to answer the question “What kind of problem is raises the project we are facing to schedule?”: therefore the different dimensions of the project are inventoried and analysed to be measured. For each of these dimensions, the related sensitive assessment methods have been proposed. Relying on the produced correlated measures, the research proposes to aggregate them through a factor analysis in order to produce the main principal components of an instance. Consequently, the complexity or the easiness of solving or realising a given scheduling problem can be evaluated. In that view, we developed a platform software to solve the problem and construct the project baseline schedule with the associated resources allocation. This platform relies on a genetic algorithm. The model has been validated, moreover, its parameters has been tuned to give the best performance, relying on an experimental design procedure. The robustness of its performance was also investigated, by a comprehensive solving of four hundred instances of projects, ranked according to the number of their tasks. Due to the dynamic aspect of the workforce’s experience, this research work investigates a set of different parameters affecting the development of their versatility. The results recommend that the firms seeking for flexibility should accept an amount of extra cost to develop the operators’ multi functionality. In order to control these over-costs, the number of operators who attend a skill development program should be optimised, as well as the similarity of the new developed skills relative to the principal ones, or the number of the additional skills an operator may be trained to, or finally the way the operators’ working hours should be distributed along the period of skill acquisition: this is the field of investigations of the present work which will, in the end, open the door for considering human factors and workforce’s flexibility in generating a work baseline program.