How fairness works in PlanMyRounds

PlanMyRounds balances total workload, shift-type mix, and preferences when generating a roster — here’s what fairness actually means and what it doesn’t guarantee.

“Fair” doesn’t mean every doctor gets exactly the same number of duties. It means the engine actively balances several factors against each other, in a fixed priority order, and reports where it couldn’t.

What the engine balances

Total workload

Distributes total shift count as evenly as possible across every doctor. This is weighted highest of the fairness factors.

Day/night mix

Tries to give each doctor a balanced mix of day and night shifts, not just an equal count of shifts.

Preferences

Tries to honour excluded shifts, excluded shift types, and shifts to avoid — weighted lowest, so it’s the first thing bent if something has to give.

Monthly hours

Keeps each doctor within their configured minimum and maximum hours for the period, and tries to bring everyone toward a target in between.

Fairness is optimised, not guaranteed

Workload balance, shift-type mix, and preferences are all soft constraints — the engine tries to satisfy them but will bend them if there’s no other way to produce a valid schedule. Hard constraints like approved leave and staffing minimums always come first. See Roster constraints for the full hard/soft breakdown.

Two adjustments run specifically to keep fairness meaningful over time: a doctor with more approved leave gets a proportionally lower workload target for the period, and doctors whose workload sits far outside the group’s normal range are flagged as outliers for you to review.

Why a doctor might get more or fewer duties than a colleague

• They have approved leave in the period, so their target is adjusted down.
• They’re new and inside their onboarding protection window, so certain shift types are excluded.
• Their excluded shifts, excluded shift types, or shifts to avoid ruled out options other doctors were eligible for.
• Their seniority is needed to meet a shift’s minimum-seniors requirement.
• They’re near their configured maximum hours for the month.

If a doctor consistently ends up over- or under-loaded for reasons that don’t match any of these, check their profile for stale settings — department, seniority, hour limits, or excluded shifts that no longer reflect reality.

Next steps

Roster constraints

The full list of hard and soft rules, including fairness.

Why wasn't a doctor assigned?

A step-by-step diagnostic if a specific assignment looks wrong.