Razavi Journal of Medicine

Razavi Journal of Medicine

A Two-Stage Stochastic Programming for Nurse Scheduling in Razavi Hospital

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
Mohsen Bagheri 1
Ali Gholinejad Devin 1
Azra Izanloo 2
1 Department of Industrial Engineering, Sadjad University of Technology, Mashhad, IR Iran
2 Research and Education Department, Razavi Hospital, Mashhad, IR Iran
10.30483/rijm.2015.118379
Abstract
Background: One of most important operations research problems is Nurse Scheduling Problem (NSP) that tries to find an optimal way to assign nurses to shifts with a set of hard constraints. Most of the researches are dealing with this problem in deterministic environment with constant parameters. While In the real world applications of NSP, the stochastic nature of some parameters like number of arriving patients, stay periods, etc. are some sources of uncertainties that need to be controlled to provide a qualified schedule.
Objectives: In this article we propose our model in an uncertain environment in Department of Heart Surgery in Razavi Hospital.
 
Materials and Methods: The demand and stay period of patients are stochastic whose the distribution is determined from historical data. Finally, the demand of nurses in each shift in planning horizon is calculated regarding the priority (vitality) of patients.
 
Results: The stochastic optimization is adapted for our problem and the Sample Average Approximation (SAA) method is used to obtain a optimal schedule with respect to minimizing the regular and over time assignment costs. The results have been analyzed and show the validity of our model.
 
Conclusions: In this model the demand and stay period of patients are stochastic whose the distribution is determined from historical data. We also consider the priority (vitality) of patients in our model.
Keywords
Nurse
Uncertainty
Stochastic Processes
Patients

Open Access Policy: This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Razavi Journal of Medicine
Volume 3, Issue 1
Winter 2015