Track: Undergraduate Research Competition

Abstract

The paper addresses an actual personnel scheduling problem in the COVID-19 pandemic, which happened in one of the hospitals in the Philippines. The scheduling focuses on the doctors, nurses, and health aides to meet the current and future workforce demands at the hospital. However, there has not been much attention given to optimizing working time schedules specifically for medical personnel. For this reason, the study's objective is to achieve labor efficiency, lowering hospital and medical center costs to increase the productivity of medical front-liners while developing an ideal schedule for healthcare workers in charge of COVID-19 patients. The researchers used a cost-benefit trade-off analysis to determine how many hospital personnel should be on duty at any given time. It provides an answer to the question of how many hospital personnel should begin work on each shift. And what time do they start each 24 hour day of a seven-day week? Use of Linear Interactive and Discrete Optimizer (LINDO) software to solve the working time scheduling problem. The beginning cost for employee scheduling was $ 5188.35 and resulted in a monthly total labor cost of $ 1880.13 as optimized through the utilization of Operations Research analysis. The hospital savings in this paper are 63.61%  as an improvement to reducing labor costs, and the recommended number of hospital staff shows to improve labor efficiency to 64.07%.

Keywords: Personnel Scheduling, Operations Research, Cost-benefit-trade-off, LINDO, COVID-19