The sustainable delivery of Home Health Care (HHC) is increasingly critical as ageing populations and rising service demands place pressure on health and social care systems. HHC involves complex decision-making across strategic, tactical, and operational levels, often constrained by limited resources such as workforce availability. While Operational Research (OR) has been widely applied to support operational decisions in HHC, recent reviews highlight a lack of focus on strategic and tactical planning, and limited recognition of the hierarchical structure linking decisions across levels. This undermines the potential of OR to inform real-world planning effectively. To address these gaps, we propose a modelling approach that enables consistent analysis of HHC decisions across planning levels. We first defined a modular approach for analysing hierarchies of decisions covering the strategic, tactical, and operational levels, and accounting for cascade effects. Then, we applied those principles by developing a configurable tool in R, comprising a synthetic data generator and a suite of optimisation and heuristic routines. We illustrate the benefits of this approach through a case study inspired by a question faced by a collaborating home health care organisation. Our results demonstrate the value of this structured modelling approach for informing decisions in Home Health Care. The emphasis we gave on modularity facilitated the development of an analysis tool that can be easily adapted to different hierarchies of decisions and different settings.
OptoLoop: An optogenetic tool to probe the functional role of genome organization
The genome folds inside the cell nucleus into hierarchical architectural features, such as chromatin loops and domains. If and how this genome organization influences the