Physician Staffing For Emergency Departments With Time-varying Demand

One of the toughest issues in modern hospitals is the congestion of Emergency Departments(EDs),and the mismatch between fluctuations of patient arrivals and fixed shifting of physicians is mostly responsible for this,which results in the long waiting time for the patients.In this paper,we firstly propose an approximation of the waiting time for the patients in the time-varying system: separate the patients served and patients overflowed in a period,apply continuous service,M/M/c approximation for patients served and waiting time analysis for overflowed patients.And then model the day staffing problem with mix integer program based on certain constraints aiming at minimizing the total waiting time of the patients.To solve the problem,we design a Variable Neighborhood Search(VNS)algorithm.At last,broaden the problem to weekly staffing.The numerical experiments give some insight for the management of hospitals.