| Article ID: | iaor20105028 |
| Volume: | 178 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Start Page Number: | 5 |
| End Page Number: | 21 |
| Publication Date: | Jul 2010 |
| Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
| Authors: | Dellaert Nico, Mincsovics Gergely |
| Keywords: | financial |
We address the nursing service budgeting problem from the department manager's point of view. The model allocates the budget dynamically to three types of nursing care capacities: 1) permanent nurses, 2) temporary nurses, and 3) overtime. The quarterly tactical decisions are the aggregate weekly shift pattern of permanent nurses and the policy for hiring temporary nurses and using overtime. The decisions are optimized with respect to nursing care shortage and a soft-constraint on the annual budget. For the aggregate weekly shift pattern, permanent nurses require a notification lead-time of one quarter to prepare the personal rosters. Our model offers a solution to the nursing service budgeting problem that extends the existing literature by using a Markovian demand model, resolving the anticipation of the operational decisions, and applying general budget as well as shortage penalty functions.