Algorithms for optimizing hospital schedules

PROJECT
Do you have family members or know somebody that works as a nurse or doctor? Then you most likely have heard, that their working schedules are very inflexible and that they have little to no say in when they work. The working schedule is often created manually by a senior member of staff and takes a significant amount of time to finish. But the task of scheduling work is not simple. Even the smallest departments often have > 50 staff members, each with their own wishes and with complex working regulations. So a human planner obviously can’t perform this task on their own. This is where operations research comes into the picture. It can be a tool to quickly create a functional schedule and make adjustments and quantify whether the schedule is fair or not. This is all my PhD is about! I design methods to consider new and more flexible schedules for nurses and doctors. The outcomes will be in the form of recommendations to both decision makers and schedulers. My main focus is on the impact of novel shift systems and of certain modelling tricks used by planners.

CONTENT OF THE PRESENTATION
I will start the session by briefly sharing my academic and professional experience: High school in Denmark Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering r at DTU followed by a Masters in Mathematical Modelling and Computation at DTU 2,5 years working in transport software company in Copenhagen. Currently PhD student in Healthcare Operations Research at DTU, near Copenhagen I will then present my PhD project. I will try to explain what Operations Research is and how it is used in everyday life (Lectio for high school students). I will present the societal relevance of the project (ensuring better work-lives for healthcare staff and better usage of “warm hands”) The presentation will be based on PowerPoint slides. To make the session more engaging for the students I will bring some toy examples for them and explain how it can be related to their lives.