Human resource management: new approach to nurse scheduling by considering human error

Human error is a critical concern in healthcare systems from primary care clinics to operating rooms in hospitals. Prevention or reduction of the chance of occurrence of such errors through increasing human reliabilities is tremendously important and deserves to be focused within personnel scheduling problems in healthcare systems. The present study is to develop a new multi-objective integer mathematical model which includes human errors of nurses to determine optimal shift scheduling of nurses. In addition to medical errors, several constraints in real-world problem including “minimum number of available nurses in each shift”, “restrictions on shift rotation for each nurse”, and “Minimum and maximum working hours in a week” are also taken into account. Nurses’ preference score, allocation costs, penalty cost of violating soft constraints, and human errors are all considered as objectives to be optimized. The multi-objective model, developed in this study, is solved by employing the weighted-sum method. To verify and validate the proposed model, a test problem is also solved. Sensitivity analysis on the model indicates that the solution method can reach acceptable solutions within an acceptable time. The present study is to help decision-makers to achieve optimal scheduling for decreasing costs and improving safety in healthcare systems. Based on this approach, decision makers can totally minimize the number of errors by considering the number of nurses required in each grade as well as proper allocation of them to different work shifts.