Abstract
Site selection of health facilities is critical in ensuring universal access to basic healthcare services. However, in many low and middle-income countries (LMICs) like the Philippines, site selection is traditionally based on political and pragmatic considerations. Moreover, literature that demonstrates the application of facility location models in the Philippine healthcare setting remains scarce, and their usage in actual facility planning is even more limited. In this study, we proposed a variation of cooperative covering maximal models to identify the optimal location of primary care facilities. We demonstrated the feasibility of implementing such a model by using open source data on an actual city in the Philippines. Our results generated multiple candidate locations of primary care facilities depending on the equity and efficiency parameters. This approach could be used as one of the critical considerations in evidence-based, multi-criterion health facility location decisions of governments, and can also be adapted in other industries, given the model’s use of readily available open source datasets.
Highlights
Health facility location is a critical factor in strategic planning of healthcare programs [1, 2]
We explored a solution to the facility location problem that incorporates these open source datasets into the cooperative maximal covering model, which maximizes the number of people covered by the facilities, given a fixed number of sites to be built [22]
We proposed a framework for selecting an optimal location for rural health units (RHUs) site selection, by leveraging open source data and empirical work from previous healthcare studies
Summary
Health facility location is a critical factor in strategic planning of healthcare programs [1, 2]. A well-placed health facility increases uptake of essential healthcare services and improves health outcomes especially among vulnerable populations [3, 4]. In many low and middle-income countries (LMICs), the decision to build health facilities is traditionally based on political and pragmatic considerations [5]. Governments are increasingly interested in studying where to build health facilities to facilitate the achievement of health system goals. In the Philippines, access to basic healthcare services remains a major challenge. This is largely attributed to scarcity and maldistribution of health facilities in many parts of the country.
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