Prioritizing health care interventions: A multicriteria resource allocation model to inform the choice of community care programmes

Abstract

Many countries, including Portugal, are currently dealing with budget cuts and a shortage of resources in the health sector, while the demand for health care services is increasing. The Group of Health Centres (GHC) of Northern Lisbon faces the challenge of prioritizing community care programmes in order to decide which programmes to fund. We describe the development with the GHC of a Multi-criteria model to allocate human resources in community care programmes (MARCCO). Building MARCCO was a socio-technical process using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in a decision conferencing environment. The GHC used the results obtained by MARCCO to select programmes and to redesign its information system. MARCCO contributes to the literature by showing how a constructive approach using MCDA methods and decision conferencing is an alternative to conventional approaches used in the prioritization of interventions in the health care sector.