We are a software company that provides a workforce scheduling
solution to large manufacturers that have complicated and challenging
scheduling requirements. We plan to tailer the software to suit other
industries and wish to start with Healthcare facilities and large
hospitals. Here are our questions:

What are the primary challenges to scheduling the employees in a large hospital?

In a large hospital, how many different job classifications are nurses
assigned to?

In a typical day for a nurse, are they required to change their job
assignment or do they work at the same job assignment for an entire
shift?

Do nurses have to change their job assignments from time to time and
if so, how frequently?

Do nurses have seniority rights?

Dear  tschilling

Your question is about to expire, and you might be disappointed that
it hasn't been answered.

This might be because you ask numerous questions. Only one researcher
could answer your question, and if he or she wouldn't find an answer
to even one of the questions, they will not answer. I suggest that
you'll separate your questions into different posts.

In addition, I must say that some of your questions are pretty vague.
For example: "Do nurses have seniority rights?" - this could change
from one country to another, and in fact, from one hospital to
another. You can't really think that it is the same all over.

Hello tschilling-ga,

Here's an interesting discussion of the issues involved.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/10/1419251&tid=185&tid=164&tid=4
Scheduling Software for Large Organziations.

DrCJM asks: "My wife works for a large hospital here in Australia,
where her main role is building, managing and (where needed!)
enforcing a schedule for all the junior doctors. This schedule covers
several campuses, different specialty streams, different expertise
levels, and so on. I'm sure there's a scheduling software package out
there that can do all of the basic scheduling much faster than their
current method of sitting down with very large bits of paper and lots
of coloured pens. What software have Slashdot readers encountered that
might do the job? Open Source would be great, but commercial efforts
are acceptable too."