Long-term staff scheduling with regular temporal distribution.

Area of Science:

• Operations Research
• Healthcare Management
• Computer Science

Background:

• Optimal staff scheduling often necessitates complex computational methods.
• However, less constrained scheduling problems can be addressed with simpler strategies.
• Physician shift scheduling in hospitals presents unique challenges regarding fairness and workload distribution.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe a simplified procedure for assigning physician guard shifts.
• To address the need for regular duty distribution and uniform workload.
• To ensure varied team compositions in shift assignments.

Main Methods:

• A hybrid approach combining random and greedy strategies with heuristics was employed.
• The method was applied to a Spanish hospital's physician department for guard shift assignments.
• The procedure is suitable when the number of available employees is not significantly smaller than required staff per shift.

Main Results:

• The described procedure successfully assigned guard shifts to physicians.
• It achieved regular distribution of duties over time.
• It ensured uniform workload distribution, considering various shift types and constraints.

Conclusions:

• A simple, heuristic-based procedure can efficiently solve certain staff scheduling problems.
• This method provides a practical solution for physician shift assignments in healthcare settings.
• The approach balances employee preferences with operational constraints effectively.