Personnel and patient scheduling in the high demanded hospital services: a case study in the physiotherapy service.

High demand but limited staffs within some services of a hospital require a proper scheduling of staff and patients. In this study, a hierarchical mathematical model is proposed to generate weekly staff scheduling. Due to computational difficulty of this scheduling problem, the entire model is broken down into manageable three hierarchical stages: (1) selection of patients, (2) assignment of patients to the staff, (3) scheduling of patients throughout a day.