Solving an outpatient nurse scheduling problem by binary goal programming

Abstract

The cyclic scheduling for staffs in hospitals has been widely studied but none in the literature is about the nurse scheduling problem in the outpatient departments. Considering fairness and relevant constraints in scheduling outpatient nurses, this study formulates the nurse assignment problem as a binary goal programming model. An optimized and “fair” weekly schedule satisfying the stated hospital’s policies and the outpatient nurses’ preferences is solved. A “fair” schedule is in the sense that the number of due shifts and the shift patterns are assigned as same as possible for all the full-time nurses during the weekdays. A sensitivity analysis on the number of full-time nurses is also performed to answer the question about the best utilization in scheduling nurses. This study replaces the manual-made schedule with a computerized one and provides hospital managers insights in identifying the best human-resource portfolio in outpatient nurse scheduling.