Finding Good Nursing Duty Schedules: A Case Study

MJ Louw¹, I Nieuwoudt¹ & JH van Vuuren¹

Abstract

Constructing duty schedules for nurses at large hospitals can be a difficult problem. The objective is usually to ensure that there is always sufficient staff on duty, while taking into account individual preferences with respect to work patterns, requests for leave and financial restrictions, in such a way that all employees are treated fairly. The problem is typically solved via mixed integer programming, graph theoretic, or heuristic methods in the operations research literature. This paper demonstrates how the problem may be solved using a tabu search heursitic approach that is applied to a special case study at Stikland Hospital, a large psychiatric hospital in the South African Western Cape, for which a computerised decision support system with respect to nurse scheduling was developed. This decision support system, called NuRoDSS (short for Nurse Rostering Decision Support System) is described in some detail and has wider application possibilities than merely finding efficient nursing duty schedules.

An electronic version of the complete paper may be obtained here: [pdf].

Affiliations

¹ Department of Applied Mathematics, Stellenbosch University, Private Bag X1, Matieland, 7602, Republic of South Africa, fax: +27 21 8083778, email: vuuren@sun.ac.za

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