Long term staff scheduling of physicians with different experience levels in hospitals using column generation

Abstract

We present a strategic model to solve the long-term staffing problem of physicians in hospitals using flexible shifts. The objective is to minimize the total number of staff subject to several labor agreements. A wide range of legal restrictions and facility-specific staffing policies are considered. In general, the model is capable to incorporate different experience levels. In the simplest version the model decides about the number of staff for two experience levels, i.e. the number of residents (low experience) versus specialists (high experience). Shifts are constructed implicitly by the model and may have different starting times and several lengths. This allows more flexibility in the scheduling process. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer program and solve it applying a column generation based heuristic. Using data provided by an anesthesia department of an 1100-bed hospital, computational results demonstrate the usage of the model as decision supporting tool when staffing decision are made by hospital management.

Workforce planning incorporating skills: State of the art

“…Wu et al [117] and Wu et al [116] therefore compare the results obtained with their exact branch and bound technique to the results obtained with a heuristic algorithm. [1,2,3,7,9,10,11,15,16,17,21,22,24,25,27,29,32,33,34,36,38,39,41,48,49,52,55,57,64,66,68,72,73,74,80,82,83,87,90,98,100,103,104,107,109,110,113,114,116,…”

Duty rostering for physicians at a department of orthopedics and trauma surgery

“…Even though physician scheduling has received growing attention in the scheduling and operations research literature within the last years [3], the schedules and duty rosters used in practice are often still created manually by an experienced physician [4], which not only leads to unfairness and violations of labor regulations, but also requires a large amount of a highly trained physician's valuable time. Thus, there is still a lot of potential for practical applications of operations research methods in physician scheduling.…”

Multi-Workday Ergonomic Workforce Scheduling With Days Off

“…Its emphasis might be on the minimization of either the total number of workers (Alfares, 2002) or total cost (Elshafei and Alfares, 2008). WSP has been studied in various service systems, for example, the crew scheduling of the Hong Kong Light Rail Transit (Chu and Chan, 1998), the scheduling of staff at the United States Postal Service (Bard et al 2003), and the staff scheduling in the healthcare system (Brunner and Edenharter, 2011).…”