Automatic Scheduling of Nurses: What Does It Take in Practice?

Abstract

Abstract:Many hospital wards need to be staffed by nurses around the clock every day of the year, and because of that, many nurses have to work irregular hours and according to schedules that have a great impact on their personal lives. Today most schedules are made by hand or with limited computer support, and this is both difficult and very time consuming. A common consequence of making the schedules by hand is that the outcome is neither favourable for the nurses nor satisfactory for the running of the ward. The nurse scheduling problem is well suited for addressing with operations research methods, but a challenge for automated scheduling of nurses is the ability to adapt the scheduling to the specific conditions on each ward. The intention of this paper is to provide a piece of practical experience that can help bridge the gap between advanced method development and the use of automatic nurse scheduling in practice. Our approach is to take on the real life scheduling problem with all its details, and to use a straightforward meta-heuristic in order to deliver automatically generated schedules. The contribution of the paper is based on the result of two case studies, which will provide insights into examples of real world nurse scheduling, including evaluation and feedback from the wards.

A Learning Large Neighborhood Search for the Staff Rerostering Problem

“…We now define the repair operator used in each LNS applied in this work and propose a reasonable manually crafted destroy operator that serves as a baseline for comparison in our computational experiments. The construction heuristic (inspired by [35]) used to create an initial solution for the LNS simply takes the provided original schedule and, when an employee is absent on a working shift, changes the assignments to a free shift. The obtained initial solution will therefore typically be infeasible and this has to be considered in the LNS design.…”

A flexible mixed integer programming-based system for real-world nurse rostering

“…When measuring the fulfillment of requests they used a normalized score allowing them to objectively compare different nurses. Rönnberg et al (2013) generalized this model, allowing other objectives and removing the requirement to request full schedules. To solve that formulation, they employed a meta-heuristic.…”

The Benefit of Shift Work Schedules for Nurses’ Outcome: A Sytematic Review

“…There is a shortage of nurses in a number of nations, which raises the requirement for welfare administration processes, which are essential for duty performance. One of the potential and long-lasting advantages to the officer's functioning state is the availability and variety of nurse requests in their schedule (Rönnberg et al, 2013).…”