Resident Scheduling in Teaching Hospitals

After graduation, physicians receive further training in a medical domain like anesthesiology. There are 57 medical specialties in Germany in total. The high cost pressures of hospitals and the changing view of the medical profession regarding the work-life balance have led to recruitment problems and low employee satisfaction in many places. A promising approach to counter this problem is objective and structured training planning. This research project mainly deals with medical residents’ strategic and tactical-operative training scheduling. In addition to relieving the medical staff currently responsible for the planning process, this research project increases the predictability of structured training. This allows hospitals to increase the quality of their training and, consequently, their attractiveness to other hospitals. In addition, supervisors from different departments can better assess residents’ knowledge and thus keep the level of service, which is particularly important in hospitals, permanently high even when changing residents. From the residents’ point of view, a well-structured training schedule enables a high degree of information. Therefore, residents are no longer surprised by a short-term change of department and have a direct insight into their training progress. A real-world case study evaluates the mathematical formulations and the solution approaches.