Defining the regional healthcare planning objective using a multi-criteria approach

Regional health care planning deals with the regional healthcare resource location–allocation problem posed to each public healthcare administration. Up to date, the models designed to support this kind of decision failed in their application. We found that the main reason is that often these models restrict the problem to a unique aspect (such as ‘covering of the territory’ or ‘technique efficiency’), leaving outside a set of very important other dimensions, even if these are usually subjective and difficult to formalise. In this paper we present a method to identify formally these dimensions, by assigning measurable attributes to each of them. At a different level, we propose a hierarchical formulation of the overall objective of the regional healthcare resource planning for the facility systems; in this hierarchy, each leaf term corresponds to a formal evaluation criterion.