A Mobile Healthcare Service Routing and Scheduling Problem in Rural Areas

Abstract

A change in health policy become essential since healthcare needs of societies have changed over the past sixty years. It is not possible to build a hospital wherever people live especially in less populated settlements. However, equal access of people to health services must be ensured by governments. To tackle this issue, Turkey Ministry of Health has enforced to give mobile healthcare services in rural areas by approximately 7.5 thousand doctors located in 3.4 thousand medical centers. These doctors work 8 h/day and give mobile healthcare service to approximately 9 million people each month. This study considers Turkey rural healthcare delivery system as a Multi-depot Time Constrained Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (md-TCPVRP) and presents a mixed-integer linear programming formulation for the problem. The goal is to derive daily routes of the doctors each month, under some constraints such as maximum workhours, route duration, minimum service time per visit, assigning dedicated doctors to villages while minimizing the total route distance. In order to investigate the performance of the model a computational experiment is carried. The real-life application of Health Directorate of the province and proposed mathematical model results are compared. Computational results show significant improvements in total distances. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.