Personnel scheduling: A literature review

We provide a comprehensive overview of the typical decisions to be made in resource capacity planning and control in health care, and a structured review of relevant articles from the field of Operations Research and Management Sciences (OR/MS) for each planning decision. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, to position the planning decisions, a taxonomy is presented. This taxonomy provides health care managers and OR/MS researchers with a method to identify, break down and classify planning and control decisions. Second, following the taxonomy, for six health care services, we provide an exhaustive specification of planning and control decisions in resource capacity planning and control. For each planning and control decision, we structurally review the key OR/MS articles and the OR/MS methods and techniques that are applied in the literature to support decision making.

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Taxonomic classification of planning decisions in health care: a structured review of the state of the art in OR/MS

https://repositorio.inesctec.pt/bitstream/123456789/3167/1/PS-06772.pdf

Operations Research in Healthcare: a survey

This paper presents a review and classification of the literature regarding workforce planning problems incorporating skills. In many cases, technical research regarding workforce planning focuses very hard on the mathematical model and neglects the real life implications of the simplifications that were needed for the model to perform well. On the other hand, many managerial studies give an extensive description of the human implications of certain management decisions in particular cases, but fail to provide useful mathematical models to solve workforce planning problems. This review will guide the operations researcher in his search to find useful papers and information regarding workforce planning problems incorporating skills. We not only discuss the differences and similarities between different papers, but we also give an overview of the managerial insights. The objective is to present a combination of technical and managerial knowledge to encourage the production of more realistic and useful solution techniques.

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Workforce Planning Incorporating Skills: State of the Art

Workforce planning incorporating skills: State of the art

Preference scheduling for nurses using column generation

This paper presents a new methodology for reactively scheduling nurses in light of shift-by-shift imbalances in supply and demand. In most hospitals, the nursing staff is given a midterm schedule that specifies their work assignments for up to 6 weeks at a time. However, emergencies, call-outs, and normal fluctuations in personnel requirements can play havoc with the schedule. As a result, it is necessary to make short-term adjustments, either by reallocating resources when shortages exist or by cancelling assignments when demand drops. The need to take into account individual preferences further complicates the process. The problem associated with making the daily adjustments is formulated as an Integer Program (IP) and solved within a rolling horizon framework. The idea is to consider 24 hours at a time, but to only implement the results for the first 8 hours. The IP is then re-solved for the next 24 hours after several hours have elapsed and new data are available, and so on. Initial attempts to solve ...

Hospital-wide reactive scheduling of nurses with preference considerations

Hourly changes in patient census and acuity require hospitals to update their staffing needs on a continuing basis. This paper discusses the problem that management faces several times a day as the demand for nursing services departs from the planned schedule. Prior to the start of each shift, the number of nurses who are scheduled to be on duty over the next 24 hours is compared with the number actually available, and if shortages exist a series of decisions have to be made to ensure that each unit in the hospital has sufficient coverage. These decisions involve the use of overtime, outside nurses, and floaters. To address this problem, we have developed an integer programming model that takes the current set of rosters for regular and pool nurses and the expected demand for the upcoming 24 hours as input, and produces a revised schedule that makes the most efficient use of the available resources. The model is formulated and solved at a hospital-wide level rather than for each unit separately. To determine its applicability, a representative set of scenarios was investigated using data obtained from a medium-size facility in the U.S. with 14 units. The results indicate that problem instances with up to 120 nurses can be solved in a negligible amount of time.

Short-term nurse scheduling in response to daily fluctuations in supply and demand

The demand for nurses in virtually all western countries has been outpacing the supply for more than a decade. The situation is now at the point where the rules for good practice are being stretched to the limit and patient care is in jeopardy. The purpose of this paper is to present several ideas for maximizing the use of the available staff and to quantify the resultant benefits. Two approaches are investigated for substituting nurses with higher level skills for those with lower level skills when there is sufficient idle time to do so. Idle time is usually due to scheduling constraints and contractual agreements that prevent a hospital from arbitrarily assigning nurses to shifts over the week. When the substitution is skill-related, as it is here, it is often called downgrading. The models that we develop are for preference scheduling, which means that individual preferences are taken into account when constructing monthly rosters. There are several reasons for doing this in today's environment, the most important is the need to boost staff morale and increase retention. The problem is modeled as an integer program and solved with a column generation technique that relies on intelligent heuristics for identifying good candidate schedules. The computations show that high quality solutions, as measured by the reduction in the need for non-unit nurses as well as the degree to which preferences are satisfied, can usually be obtained in a matter of minutes.

A column generation-based approach to solve the preference scheduling problem for nurses with downgrading

The invention provides a system and method for scheduling resources. In one respect, embodiments of the invention allow workers to indicate preferences for specific shifts during a planning horizon, within limitations imposed by the scheduling system. Embodiments of the system and method seek to meet all hard constraints, and utilize a flexible scoring technique to minimize the violation of soft constraints. Embodiments also consider the substitution of higher skilled workers in cases where there is an unmet demand for lower skilled workers.

Hadi Purnomo

Papers

Preference scheduling for nurses using column generation

Hospital-wide reactive scheduling of nurses with preference considerations

Short-term nurse scheduling in response to daily fluctuations in supply and demand

A column generation-based approach to solve the preference scheduling problem for nurses with downgrading

System and method for preference scheduling of staffing resources