You are the chief medical officer at Langdon Prairie Health (LPH). You need to make sure you have at least 1 medical doctor and 1 nurse practitioner on at ALL times covering the emergency department and inpatient unit. You require 24-hour shift coverage for every day of the week throughout the year.

Providers available for this structure schedule include full-time providers working 7am-7am and part time providers who can work 12-hour shifts from 7a-7p or from 7p-7a.

To ensure fairness all employed, LPH has determined that each FT provider must work at least 2-24 hour shifts and each PT provider needs to work at least 2-12 hours shifts.

Each provider must work at least 1 weekend per month; regardless of status. Each provider will also be allowed 4 weeks off.

Determine how many of each type of provider is needed to be hired to minimize the number of total employees. The optimal solution will be 16.

Suppose LPH is looking to cut costs and wants to minimize the number of full-time employees to help reduce benefit expenditures without increasing the total number of employees. Resolve this problem with the new goal and constraint. Discuss both the original and secondary goal recommendations and outcomes.

Use Solvertable to see what happens to total FT and PT employees when the required number of weekends changes from 1 per month to 2 weekends per month. Think about what you'd want to see as manager when building this.