Planning problems of nurses: Case of a Moroccan healthcare unit

Healthcare systems are facing the human resources planning's problem as a result of the budgets restrictions and the productivity improvement's need, while ensuring care services’ quality provided to patients. In this paper, we focus on the nurses’ schedule problem in a hospital center in Morocco. Different works in the last years indicate that this assignment to the different activities must comply with many constraints (professional rules, workload, individual preference, skills, etc.) while optimizing one or several objectives (equity in the work, the costs, etc.). We present a description of the studied service as well as professional rules adopted and a mathematical formulation with a mixed integer linear program (MILP). The problem is solved using the Ceplex software and the nurses’ schedule is presented which achieve the expected balancing of their workloads. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group