Physician rostering for workload balance

Continuity of care for patients, that is ensuring patients are treated by a single physician, is one of the most important concerns for hospital management in regards to general medicine (inpatient) departments. Discontinuous care occurs when the number of patients various physicians are caring for becomes imbalanced and patients are transferred between physicians to correct this. This issue can be addressed by constructing rosters for the physicians which aim to balance their patient workloads and thereby improve the continuity of care that patients receive. A mixed integer programme, which uses admission information coupled with a model of the patient pathways, is formulated to generate cyclic rosters for general medicine physicians. The capabilities of the model are demonstrated by applying it to a New Zealand hospital. A solution technique is also proposed and numerical experiments performed on the demonstration instance.