Research On Operating Room Nurse Scheduling Based On Goal Programming

The nurses working in the operating room need to concentrate the whole energy during the period of operation, and whether one operating room nurse has a good fettle has an important role in the safety of operation. For this reason, preparing schedules that suit for operating room nurses is important for reducing the negative impact on nurses physiologically and psychologically.Operating room nurse scheduling problem is complicated, because a large number of constraints have to be considered. When we seek to solve operating room nurse scheduling problem, we ought to consider the limits from hospital objectives, patients'needs, working rules and nurses'preferences. The study aims at proposing a scheme which will satisfy those constraints as more as possible.In this study, a nurse-scheduling model is established according to a 0-1 goal program. The 0-1 goal programming model accommodates both hard constraints and soft constraints for a monthly planning horizon. The relative importance values of the soft constraints have been computed by the analytical hierarchy process.The model is implemented in an operating room unit of one hospital by the way of LINDO. The result of the experiment indicates the schedule proposed performs better than the current manual-made schedules. According to the rules of lean management, we can implement schedule proposed in the operating room better.