Integer and Stochastic Programming Approaches to Scheduling Nursing Staff at Long-term Care Homes

We study nurse scheduling problems for long-term care homes motivated by a collaboration with the City of Toronto Long Term Care Homes Services (LTCH) division. The current scheduling process at the LTCH division is time-consuming and the absenteeism rates are high among part-time nurses. First, we formalize a complex set of seniority requirements, incorporate nurse preferences into the scheduling process, and propose a hierarchical optimization procedure to generate schedules which maximize demand fulfillment and the preferences of the nurses. We develop a spreadsheet-based scheduling tool to automate the generation of schedules and discuss the results and challenges of an implementation at a large care home in Toronto. Second, we propose a stochastic version of the model which explicitly accounts for the uncertainty introduced by absenteeism. We investigate solution methods for the proposed model and find that the resulting schedules can lead to a considerable reduction in the absenteeism rate.M.A.S