POLICY STATEMENT The primary goal of antenatal evaluation is to identify fetuses at risk for intrauterine injury and death so that intervention and timely delivery can prevent progression to stillbirth. It should be understood however, that despite widespread use of many tests, limited evidence exists to demonstrate effectiveness at improving perinatal outcomes with application of these tests. ...

Objective: Faculty who are aware of culturally responsive practices are better positioned to implement teaching-learning strategies that meet the educational needs of culturally diverse learners. This study investigated the extent to which faculty used practices that promoted the academic success of African American and Hispanic minority nursing students and their preparedness in teaching these...

Timetabling and rostering research often starts from particular real world problems. The last two decennia have seen a large number of papers discussing cases, models and approaches. This large body of papers does not presently consitute a structured domain that provides guidelines for addressing particular problem instances, nor does it allow identifying gaps where new research is needed. In t...

We argue that Nash’s solution to the bargaining problem should be modified such that it will be based on a New Reference Point (NRP). Such a point is needed so that a player is not considered ‘individually rational’ if he accepts an agreement that provides him with a utility lower than the minimal utility he can derive from any Pareto optimal agreement, or if he accepts an agreement that provid...

In this contribution, a generic two-phase stochastic variable neighborhood approach is applied to nurse rostering problems. The proposed algorithm is used for creating feasible and efficient nurse rosters for many different nurse rostering cases. In order to demonstrate the efficiency and generic applicability of the proposed approach, experiments with real-world input data coming from many dif...

Labor costs are amongst the most important costs for companies in highly developed countries. While manufacturers move their production units en masse to low wage countries, service companies are often tied to their current locations. Unlike production, the service surplus value is often directly related to the place where the service is provided. Moreover, service companies generally require m...

Global constraints are useful for modelling and reasoning about real-world combinatorial problems. Unfortunately, developing propagation algorithms to reason about global constraints efficiently and effectively is usually a difficult and complex process. In this paper, we show that reformulation may be helpful in building such propagators. We consider both hard and soft forms of two powerful gl...

Nurse Rostering Problems (NRPs) consist of generating rosters where required shifts are assigned to nurses over a scheduling period satisfying a number of constraints. In [25], we have shown how soft global constraints can be used to model NRPs in a concise and elegant way. In this paper we go one step further by proposing new neighborhood heuristics for VNS/LDS+CP. Experiments show that, despi...

In this paper, we present a hybrid genetic algorithm for the well-known nurse scheduling problem (NSP). The NSP involves the construction of roster schedules for nursing staff in order to maximize the quality of the roster schedule and to minimize the violations of the minimal coverage requirements subject to various hard case-specific constraints. In literature, several genetic algorithms have...

The challenge in shift scheduling lies in the construction of a set of work shifts, which are subject to specific regulations, in order to cover fluctuating staff demands. This problem becomes harder when multiskill employees can perform many different activities during the same shift. In this paper, we show how formal languages (such as regular and context-free languages) can be enhanced and u...