A recent post on the OTN database forum highlights a couple of important points ideas for optimising SQL. There are: (a) is there a logically equivalent way of stating the SQL and (b) is there a different “natural language” way of posing the problem.
The posting starts with a query, part of an execution plan, and a request to “get rid of the tablescan”. I guessed originally that the query came from an 11g instance, and the OP gave us some code to create the tables and indexes, so I’ve modelled the tables to get the indicated plan (then filled in the original numbers). This is the query, and my cosmetically adjusted version of the plan output that the OP probably got: