Nurse Scheduling Model in Saudi Arabia Hospitals

Abstract

The nurse-scheduling problem (NSP) is a critical issue in the healthcare sector. Hospitals must provide an effective, efficient, and high-quality service to their patients, where the aim of the hospital is to ensure that business is continuously with an appropriate number of staff in possession of the right skills; to achieve this, a suitable number of nurses need to be active. NSP is a very complex problem. In this paper, a model developed that can be applied in the future studies to create an algorithm to solve the nursing schedule problem in Saudi Arabian hospitals. In addition, mathematical formulations are proposed. In this work, an algorithm has been created to calculate the yearly vacation. In order to approve the schedule, it need to take into account the nurses’ preferences, which are based on general preferences, weekend preferences constraints, and yearly vacation preferences. The overall aim of this study is to automate nurse schedules, as well as maximize nurse preferences in Saudi hospitals.