Integrating Nurse and Surgery Scheduling

One common problem at hospitals is the extreme variation in daily (even hourly) workload pressure for nurses. The operating room is considered to be the main engine and hence the main generator of variance in the hospital. It is our believe that integrating the operation room scheduling process with the nurse scheduling process is a simple, yet effective way to achieve considerable savings in staffing costs. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First of all, we present a concrete model that integrates both the nurse and the operating room scheduling process. Secondly, we show how the column generation technique, often employed for nurse scheduling problems, can easily cope with this model extension. Thirdly, by means of a large number of computational experiments we provide an idea of the cost saving opportunities and required solution times.