Evaluation and scheduling of the nurses' work shifts

Hospitals are the places that work with shift system since they give 24 hours of service. Shift system is a hard system which can negatively affect workers physically and psychologically. But, the institutions which have to give continuous service such as health services and the continuous production facilities have to work with shift system. Attention and efficiency of the employees that give health services are vital. Any mistakes can result in nonreparable consequences. One way to decrease the disadvantages of the shift system is to organize the shift schedule in order not to affect the quality of the service and efficiency. In hospitals, shift schedule is mostly organized by the nurses in charge. Constraints that should be taken into consideration were determined by the interviews performed with the intensive care nurses in charge and by analyzing literature and mathematical models to be generally used were developed by using integer linear programming. Models were applied on an intensive care unit of a university hospital and optimal solutions were derived by using LINGO software. In the ?Basic Mathematical Model?, allocation of the nurses were determined by minimizing the absolute value of the difference between each nurse?s total weekly working shifts and average total weekly working shifts. In the ?Additional Nurse Assignment Model?, scheduling was performed by aiming the minimum duration of the nurses taken from other units, when the number of assigned nurses is not enough. In the ?Nurse Assignment and Seniority Based Mathematical Model?, model was built by minimizing the duration of the nurses from other units while aiming the assignment of correct number of nurses that have a defined seniority. Key words: Scheduling, Mathematical Programming, Optimization, Integer Linear Programming.