Analyzing the effects of the new labor law on outpatient nurse scheduling with law-fitting modeling and case studies

Abstract

New labor laws that include additional legal requirements or amendments occasionally come into effect, and these new laws may also bring about challenges to common hospital operations such as outpatient nurse scheduling. This research thus examines changes in Taiwan’s new labor law that might affect this scheduling problem. A binary goal programming (BGP) model appropriate to this new law is established. In order to investigate how those changes (i.e., in rest time between working days, rest time between shifts, and total maximum weekly working hours) affect scheduling decisions, we apply the model to a case in a hospital currently utilizing a different model that fits the old law and find effective concessions made to the new legislation (e.g., the tension caused by the additional overtime evening shifts during scheduling can be mitigated). The comparisons indicate that the new law does seriously affect scheduling in terms of daily work patterns, number of working days, nursing workload, and related issues. Insights are gained, showing that associated changes in the law likewise affect the human resources (HR) setting of the hospital, with a critical trade-off between reductions in full-time nurses and reductions in part-time nurses. For further model applications, a larger empirical case facing similar migration problems and another anticipated virtual problem whose size is sufficiently large in practice are also solved efficiently. Given the lack of related topics analyzing these effects on nurse scheduling, this study offers several potentially worthwhile directions for future research (e.g., another different investigation under a common law system).