Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 21
Location Problems in Healthcare
Evrim Didem Günes and Stefan Nickel
Abstract
In this chapter, we discuss facility location problems arising in the
context of healthcare. We concentrate on three main areas: the most classical one
is healthcare facility location which is closely related to public facility location.
Secondly, we look at ambulance planning which includes ambulance location
and relocation problems. In the last part, we give an overview of hospital layout
problems. For all three parts, we state some important models and give an overview
of relevant literature as well as current research directions. A comprehensive
reference list is included at the end of the chapter.
Keywords
Ambulance
location
Healthcare
facility
location
Layout
problems Public facility location
21.1
Introduction
The ageing society together with a high cost pressure on the healthcare sector brings
methods from operations research in a quite prominent place. From a perspective
of facility location, healthcare applications bring together different models from
location theory and moreover, they give raise to new models as we will see in this
chapter.
One of the most discussed topics in healthcare is the equal access to health
services and a high level of health protection at the same time which is a universal
and ageless problem. This leads to the first topic that we deal with in this chapter:
Sect.
21.2
is devoted to healthcare facility location; we review the literature and
present some classical models in that area. The reader needs some basic knowledge
on discrete facility location problems as discussed in Chaps.
2
-
5
of Part
I
of this
topic. Another crucial issue in healthcare is the time interval between an emergency
