ORAHS2025
Abstract Submission

242. Personnel scheduling in hospital emergency departments

Invited abstract in session HF-5: Innovation 4, stream Sessions.

Thursday, 15:30-17:00
Room: St Olavs, Kunnskapssenteret KA11

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Anniek Pelleboer
St. Olavs hospital
2. Henrik Andersson
Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
3. Thomas Bovim
St. Olav's Hospital
4. Anders N. Gullhav
Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
5. Gréanne Leeftink
CHOIR, University of Twente

Abstract

Personnel scheduling in hospital emergency departments (EDs) is challenged by highly variable patient arrivals and the need to balance staffing costs with quality of care. This thesis develops and evaluates a decision-support tool to optimize nurse shift scheduling in the ED of St. Olav’s Hospital (Trondheim, Norway). The approach comprises two main components. First, a demand-modelling framework classifies patients by age and triage level into 25 care-intensity groups, assigning time-dependent workload across four care phases (triage, treatment, discharge, general care). Historical arrival data (one year, aggregated into 52 weekly profiles per hour) are cleaned via IQR-based outlier filtering and Winsorizing, then converted into hourly staffing percentiles. Second, a mixed-integer linear programming model determines optimal shift schedules under constraints on contract types, overtime, weekend work, flexible tasks, and service-level targets, incorporating real-world cost parameters (base pay and premiums). Computational experiments demonstrate how the results of the proposed tool change the output measures.

Keywords

Status: accepted


Back to the list of papers