Scheduling of Nurses at a Community Health Care Centre
Abstract
This project looks at optimizing nurse schedules at a community health centre
in Vancouver, Canada. The centre provides primary care to individuals who are
unable to access conventional fee-for-service primary care. Nurses at the Centre
have reported that their schedules do a poor job of matching patient arrival levels
to the walk-in components of the clinic. This paper describes patient flow through
speci1c components of the centre as a scheduling problem in the form of a Mixed
Integer Linear Program (MILP). Having collaborated with the centre’s management,
we built diagrams outlining the flow and used electronic medical record (EMR) data
and staff opinion to estimate the parameters needed in the model. The model is
written in Python and solved using Gurobi to approximate the optimal schedule
for nurses to maximize the amount of time spent with patients. The centre has
expressed interest in implementing the generated schedules for nurses.
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