  In this paper, we study a queueing model that incorporates patient reentrance
to reflect patients' recurring requests for nurse care and their rest periods
between these requests. Within this framework, we address two levels of
decision-making: the priority discipline decision for each nurse and the
nurse-patient assignment problem. We introduce the shortest-first and
longest-first rules in the priority discipline decision problem and show the
condition under which each policy excels through theoretical analysis and
comprehensive simulations. For the nurse-patient assignment problem, we propose
two heuristic policies. We show that the policy maximizing the immediate
decrease in holding costs outperforms the alternative policy, which considers
the long-term aggregate holding cost. Additionally, both proposed policies
significantly surpass the benchmark policy, which does not utilize queue length
information.
