Physician on call scheduling: Case of a Qatari hospital

In this work, we study a real-world problem arising from the operations of a hospital service provider, which we call the master physician scheduling problem. It is a tactical planning problem of assigning physicians with different skills and seniority levels to a set of shifts to achieve a set of specific clinical/non-clinical duties over a time horizon while incorporating as many constraints and physicians / hospital requirements as possible. The constraints include- and not limited to- aspects such as limits on the number of consecutive work hours, number of shifts that should be worked by each physician according to different seniority levels, restrictions on the number of shifts assigned, vacation periods, weekend off requests, in addition to an equal and fair distribution of responsibilities among the physicians. The objectives are to generate physician schedules that satisfy as many physicians´ preferences and duty requirements as possible while ensuring optimum usage of available resources to guarantee in turn a better service to the patients. We propose mathematical programming models that represent different variants of this problem. The developed models were tested on a real case from a local government hospital. After comparing the optimal generated solution with the used manual ones, we show that our mathematical approach can significantly reduce the time and effort required to construct master physician schedules that accommodate both physicians and hospital requirements.