Duty Rostering for Physicians at a Department of Orthopedics and Trauma Surgery

Duty rostering for nurses and physicians is an important task within personnel planning in hospitals and has a large impact both on the efficient operation of the hospital and on employee satisfaction. Creating duty rosters for physicians is particularly challenging due to complex constraints (resulting, e.g., from minimum rest times and physician preferences) that should be satisfied by a „good" roster. In larger departments, these constraints cannot be handled adequately when generating duty rosters manually. This motivates using mathematical optimization models in order to generate duty rosters for physicians that satisfy all arising constraints and at the same time allow an efficient operation of the department.

This talk presents an integer programming model for the generation of duty rosters for physicians at a large department of orthopedics and trauma surgery. After presenting the specific constraints that need to be respected and the resulting model, we will additionally consider ways of dealing with unpredictable disruptions (caused, e.g., by absence of physicians due to illness) and evaluate the generated duty rosters from a practical perspective.