  The City of Toronto Long Term Care Homes & Services (LTCH&S) division is one
of the largest providers of long-term care in the Canadian province of Ontario,
providing care to 2,640 residents at 10 homes across Toronto. Our collaboration
with LTCH&S was initiated to facilitate the increasingly challenging task of
scheduling nursing staff and reduce high absenteeism rate observed among the
part-time nurses. We developed a spreadsheet-based scheduling tool to automate
the generation of schedules and incorporate nurses' preferences for different
shifts into the schedules. At the core of the scheduling tool is a hierarchical
optimization model that generates a feasible schedule with the highest total
preference score while satisfying the maximum possible demand. Feasible
schedules had to abide by a set of complex seniority requirements which
prioritized more senior nurses when allocating the available shifts. Our
scheduling tool was implemented in a 391-bed home in Toronto. The tool allowed
nursing managers to generate feasible schedules within a fraction of an hour,
in contrast to the status-quo manual approach which could took up to tens of
hours. In addition, the schedules successfully accounted for preferences with
on average above 94% of the allocated shifts ranked as most preferred.
