A rostering optimization model for physician scheduling in medical department – a case study in district hospital

Abstract

Hospitals provide a 24-hour service under high working pressure. Nowadays, physician schedule faces a problem from shortage of staff. This situation makes it difficult for physicians to provide a non-stop service all day long and results in frequent overtime. Therefore, an applicable shift becomes more important for that. In this study, we developed a mathematical programming model for scheduling the shift of the physicians and residents of the medical department. Except the rules that must to restricted, we regard the preference of people who choose the shifts will be involved in objective function which maximize the satisfaction of all physicians and residents in real case. The result shows the optimal schedules are much better than ones as before and more efficiency to create in few seconds.