Abstract
Nursing staff in various hospitals in Belgium are principally cyclically scheduled. The employed cyclic schedules embody, however, only a weak reflection of the ultimate nurse rosters constructed for a specific month. In this paper, we investigate the benefits of integrating nurse-specific characteristics in the cyclic scheduling approach. Moreover, we analyse to what extent these characteristics should be incorporated and compare this approach with a general and more robust cyclical scheduling approach and the flexible acyclical rostering of nursing personnel.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the support given to this project by the ‘Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds (BOF), Ghent University, Belgium’ under the contract number B/04668/01. Furthermore, we would like to thank Filip Demeyere, nursing director, and Denis Goeminne, department head internal medicine, for their collaboration and useful information and giving us the permission to obtain insight in a real-life problem environment. Moreover, we would like to thank all head nurses who participated in this study.