SHIFT CAPACITY PLANNING FOR NURSING STAFF IN EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT USING MIXED INTEGER PROGRAMMING

Emergency department (ED) management is one of the most challenging fields in health care. In this paper, we present a mathematical optimization model to determine shift scheduling and capacity planning policies for nursing staff in ED. In particular, we develop a mixed integer programming model, where the objective is to minimize the mean deviation of overall workloads over different time intervals of a day. Decision variables for shift capacity planning include the total number of major and minor shifts, shift working hours and nurse capacity for each shift. With ED patient administrative data of a hospital in Singapore, we derive optimal nurse staffing rules under different scenarios of nursing coverage requirements in ED. The obtained results could help plan the shifts of ED nursing staff.