Automating the self-scheduling process of nurses in Swedish healthcare: a pilot study

Abstract

Hospital wards need to be staffed by nurses round the clock, resulting in irregular working hours for many nurses. Over the years, the nurses' influence on the scheduling has been increased in order to improve their working conditions. In Sweden it is common to apply a kind of self-scheduling where each nurse individually proposes a schedule, and then the final schedule is determined through informal negotiations between the nurses. This kind of self-scheduling is very time-consuming and does often lead to conflicts.We present a pilot study which aims at determining if it is possible to create an optimisation tool that automatically delivers a usable schedule based on the schedules proposed by the nurses. The study is performed at a typical Swedish nursing ward, for which we have developed a mathematical model and delivered schedules. The results of this study are very promising.

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

“…This case is a continuation of the pilot study presented in Rönnberg and Larsson [21], which was carried out on this same ward. Within the scope of the previous pilot study, we used an AMPL (see [15]) implementation of a predecessor of our current model and CPLEX (see [16]) as solver for delivering schedules to the ward.…”

“…The main principles for how this is accomplished is described in the article Rönnberg and Larsson [21]. The calculations presented there lead to a normalisation of the fulfilment of requests, and the final outcome of these calculations is referred to as a score for each nurse.…”

“…The value of this influence is the reason why many Swedish wards use self-scheduling, despite the drawbacks presented. For a complete description of this kind of self-scheduling, the reader is referred to Rönnberg and Larsson [21].…”

“…The scheduling process used on this ward is self-scheduling, a brief description of which is found in Section 2.5 and a more thorough one in Rönnberg and Larsson [21]. Because the nurses on this ward are used to self-scheduling, the fulfilment of requests for shifts is of great importance to them, and therefore the analysis of the result will focus on the fulfilment of requests.…”

Integrated decision making in healthcare : an operations research and management science perspective

“…Sometimes, staff-to-shift assignment is integrated with staff-shift scheduling [74,525]. 'Self-scheduling' is an increasingly popular concept aimed at increased staff satisfaction which allows staff members to first propose individual schedules, which are taken as starting point to create a workable schedule that satisfies the staffing level requirement set on the tactical level [423].…”