A Heuristic Quality-based Nurse Scheduling Algorithm for Emergency Centers

Abstract

Nurse scheduling is a very complex task for the human resource director in the health organizations due to the numerous requirements, limitations and rules (often conflicting) that must be considered. Work hours, number of day and night shifts that should be worked by each nurse, the number of consecutive day and night shifts assigned, vacation periods and weekend off requests are important factor during building the scheduling. This paper proposes a Quality Based Nurse Scheduling model (QBNS). It’s a new perspective to solve the nurse scheduling problem for nurse’s duty roster which is one of the most important components in healthcare who provides services to the community round the clock. Nurse scheduling is an orchestrating dynamic process which needs coordination and interaction besides the scheduling shifting methodologies and algorithms. This scheduling has many features. It improves the quality of nurses output and working as teamwork. It also proposes scheduling based on the daily outcome for every nurse through a reliable evaluation technique which automatically distributed the nurses to the shifts in pairs. In addition to previous features it maximizes nurses preferences, minimizes unfairness assignments and finding a balanced/fair schedule.