Nurse Scheduling Problem Considering Workload Balance and Nurse Preferences: A Case Study in a French Hospital

Improving the efficiency of healthcare organizations requires primarily improving the quality of service and the well-being of medical staff. Nursing staff is a crucial human resource for which better schedules lead to better service quality, higher job satisfaction, and well being. Consequently, the Nurse Scheduling Problem has drawn significant attention during the last few decades. In practice, the schedules are usually generated manually by head service nurses. However, it is often both difficult and time consuming. Hence, in this paper, a mathematical model is proposed to solve the Nurse Scheduling Problem for a real case study from a French hospital. The proposed approach offers the possibility of a long time horizon planning satisfying work and regulation constraints, workload and shift-type balance, and nurse preferences. The results approve the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison with the manual schedule.