Priorities and allocation of health care resources in developing countries: A case-study from the Mtwara region, Tanzania

Models of health economics usually maximise the sum of individual health. However, as the term health reflects very different aspects of well being, quite different objectives can be derived for the allocation of health care resources. This paper analyses the optimum allocation of health care resources in the Mtwara region, Tanzania, for five different objectives: minimisation of death cases, minimisation of years of life lost, minimisation of incidence, minimisation of prevalence and minimisation of loss of quality of life. For this purpose a linear programme is developed. The different objective functions lead to completely different proposals of how to allocate health care resources. Therefore, the results of this paper call for a new discussion of health care priorities in developing countries.