A multi-criteria approach for equitable financial resource allocation in the health domain

For some years, the Quebec Health and Welfare Ministry allocates annual funds for specific development programs in different administrative regions of Quebec, Canada. Equitable allocation of these budgets to different social establishment of a given administrative region becomes complex. It depends on the populations to serve and on the health of these populations. In response to that problematic, the authors have developed a method which relies on the notion of ‘global health’ to maintain equitable allocation. It soon appeared that several points of view had to be considered and that the use of a multicriteria decision aid method in a constructive approach was well-adapted to this problem. This ‘constructive’ aspect of the present approach was very important here because of the political context of that problematic. In this paper, the authors related how modifications of the AHP and PROMETHEE methods were used. They describe how the criteria were defined and how the weights were obtained through the application of that methodology to the program ‘personnes agées áweights were obtained through the application of that methodology to the program ‘personnes