My mistake. I thought you meant Occupational Therapists (OT) but upon re-reading your post I was way out to lunch, however, matching demand and capacity still applies.
Here’s how I might approach the situation:
First you need to baseline your staffing requirements. Workload measurement tools (industrial engineering techniques) may be useful for estimating your staffing requirements for clinical and administrative processes, or using any established industry standards available. Allow for a target utilization rate for staff. Again it’s a matter of understanding demand. If no standard measurement tool is available, work with staff to develop the simplest workload measurement tool possible.
Then you want to create what an ideal schedule would look like, where your staffing available meets your staffing requirements at all times. From here, you introduce any constraints (i.e. fixed amount of resources, seniority limitations, shift work limitations, worker shift preferences, quality of care, provider-patient ratios) and start to create a schedule that minimizes OT. This can be done on something as rudimentary as Excel by trial and error, or if you have access to the expertise, an optimization model or a scheduling software suite.
If a target OT level is not attainable at all, then you need to consider other strategies such as workload reduction (offloading or streamlining administrative tasks), resource sharing (share or use floats from other areas if there are non-coincidental peaks in demand), greater reliance on part-time staff, increasing your staffing complement, increasing ratios, without compormising the constraints identified previously.
My $0.02.
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