Linear Programming Applied to Nurses Shifting Problems

Hospital’s key primary mission is to ensure continuous ward care service with appropriate number of nursing staffs and the right mix of nursing skills. The planning and scheduling is done to avoid additional non essential cost for hospital. Nurses’ preferences are taken into considerations such as the number of night shift and consecutive rest days. To present a mathematical modeling technique by means of linear programming as an efficient tool to solve problems related to optimization in healthcare. Hospital must be staffed 24 hours a day by a limited number of nurses. This paper illustrates how a linear programming solves the nurses scheduling problems. This paper illustrates how linear programming has been effectively used in Nurses scheduling at a multi-speciality Hospital in Coimbatore.