Nurse Scheduling & Ward Rota Generator

Ward rostering is not really a coverage problem. Coverage is the easy part: you need three RNs on days and two on nights and somebody has to be charge nurse. The hard part is that the same person cannot finish a night at 07:00 and start a day at 07:00, cannot work six nights running, and should not end up with every second weekend while the nurse next to them gets none — and all three of those constraints reach across the midnight boundary where an ordinary weekly scheduling template has nothing to say.

The sample loaded on this page is a 28-day inpatient ward: ten RNs, six aides, two 12-hour shifts, and three separate demand streams — RN headcount, aide headcount, and a charge nurse who must be one of the RNs and must be present concurrently with the RN requirement rather than instead of it. Weekend nights run one RN lighter. Press solve and you get a four-week rota with the rest rule, the consecutive-nights cap and the no-day-after-a-night rule all enforced as hard constraints.

Two things worth knowing before you trust the output. First, the charge-nurse stream carries a much higher shortage penalty than the aide stream, which is how you tell the model that an unstaffed charge shift is a different kind of problem from a missing aide — those numbers are yours to set, and they are what the solver actually trades against labour cost. Second, the results page reports continuity: how many separate blocks of consecutive days each nurse works, how long they are, and how many are lone single days. A rota can be perfectly covered and still be the kind of rota people resign over, and the block numbers are where you see that before your staff do.

Outpatient units — clinics, dialysis, dental, urgent care — usually do not need this page at all. If your demand rises and falls through a working day and nothing runs overnight, the half-hour slot optimizer models that better, because it can invent the shift boundaries instead of taking them as given. Long-term care is a different problem again and has its own page.

Nurse rostering questions

Does it handle self-scheduling or shift requests? Partly. A nurse's grid cell can be blank (unavailable), available, or f for a locked-in assignment, so requests that you have already agreed to can be pinned before solving and the model works around them. There is no request-bidding workflow — you decide what gets granted, the tool builds the rest of the rota around it.

Can it enforce a charge nurse on every shift? Yes, and that is what the concurrent flag on a demand is for. A concurrent demand is satisfied by someone who is also counted toward another stream; a non-concurrent one needs a separate body. Charge nurse is the classic concurrent case — the charge nurse is one of your RNs, not an extra.

Is the 11-hour rest rule required in the US? No. Eleven hours is the EU Working Time Directive figure and it is only the default here. There is no federal US equivalent; individual states set their own rules for healthcare and several are shorter. Set MinRestHours to whatever your state law, union contract or unit policy actually says.

Why does it say “feasible” instead of “optimal”? Because the solver ran out of its time budget before it could prove no better roster exists. The roster you got is valid and every hard rule holds — it just is not certified as the cheapest. Raise TimeLimitSeconds if you want the proof.

Can I export the rota to Excel? Yes — a nurse-by-day pivot, the assignment detail, any unfilled shifts, and the continuity numbers, in one workbook.

The same solver, other settings

Each of these loads a different worked example and is written for that setting, but they all run the same cross-day engine — if none of them matches yours, start from whichever is closest and replace the data.

• nursing home and care home rotas — CNA-to-resident ratios and the thin overnight cover that goes with them
• the general 24/7 shift schedule maker — any round-the-clock operation; start here if none of the others fit