A scheduling model for hospital residents.

When medical students finish their school they must go through a horrendous apprenticeship known as hospital residency to be able to practice medicine. During residency, they work at least 16-hr a day, 5-days a week, with 2 or 3 nights on-call. These can turn into 36-hr shifts. This means that many patients are being treated by exhausted novices, who are therefore much more likely to make mistakes. It was one such mistake, leading to the death of a New York woman, which led to serious attempts to reforming working hours of residents. In this paper, we developed a decision model which attempts to schedule residents based on the requirements of the residency program as well as the desires of residents as to days-off, weekends, on-call nights, etc.