Nurse rescheduling with shift preferences and minimal disruption

Hospital wards must be staffed 24 hours a day by a limited number of nurses. With a well documented shortage of nurses in many countries, effective scheduling of nurse shifts is crucial. Recent research on nurse scheduling has focused on creating flexible schedules that are attractive to nurses, with the joint aims of improving the quality of care and increasing staff retention. To achieve this, some level of preference scheduling is desirable in a nurse scheduling model. Furthermore, if a nurse is unable to work their assigned shifts or nursing cover requirements change, then gaps will occur in the overall schedule that must be filled by rescheduling in a manner that disrupts a little as possible the existing schedule. Little research has been carried out on rescheduling nurses while considering their own preferences as well as minimising disruption. This paper will present some models for nurse scheduling and rescheduling that consider nurses' preferences, along with some preliminary computational result