Home healthcare staff scheduling: A taxonomic state-of-the-art review

Home healthcare staff scheduling has become increasingly important as healthcare business becomes more service oriented and cost conscious. With the ever increasing home care needs, healthcare staff shortages, increasing world-wide pressure for improved health care, and the rising healthcare costs, developing appropriate models for optimizing home healthcare operations is imperative. Healthcare service providers require effective decision support tools to meet customer expectations in a cost effective manner, satisfy staff requirements such as flexible work shifts, shift equity, individual preferences, part-time work, and meet management goals. Various methods have been developed to solve homecare staff scheduling problems. In this paper, we make a state-of-the-art review of the models and algorithms that have been reported in the literature. In addition, we analyze the existing empirical studies, identifying the research trends and voids in home healthcare staff scheduling. Finally, we identify essential prospective research avenues.