Introduction

Healthcare staff scheduling plays a pivotal role in making decisions that contain and control operations costs, particularly labor costs (Ernst et al., 2004; Mutingi and Mbohwa, 2013). As labor costs continue to be a major concern to most decision makers in the healthcare sector, efficient coordination of healthcare activities is crucial. In this regard, developing new and enhanced decision support tools is highly imperative. However, scheduling healthcare staff is a complex problem area.