The Roadside Healthcare Facility Location Problem: A Managerial Network Design Challenge
2020
The population of truck drivers plays a key role in the spread of HIV and other infectious diseases in
sub-Saharan Africa. Truck drivers thereby affect the health and lives of many, but also suffer from poor
health and significantly reduced life expectancy themselves. Due to professional circumstances, their
health service needs are generally not well addressed. Therefore, the non-governmental organization
North Star Alliance builds a network of healthcare facilities along the largest trucking routes in subSaharan Africa. This paper studies the problem where to place additional facilities, and which health
service packages to offer at each facility. The objective combines the maximization of the patient
volume at these facilities and the maximization of the effectiveness of the health service delivery to the
population served. The latter criterion is modeled through three novel access measures which capture
the needs for effective service provisioning. The resulting optimization problem is essentially different
from previously studied healthcare facility location problems because of the specific mobile nature of
health service demand of truck drivers. Applying our model to the network of major transport corridors
in South-East Africa, we investigate several prominent questions managers and decision makers face.
We show that the present network expansion strategy, which primarily focuses on patient volumes, may
need to be reconsidered: substantial gains in effectiveness can be made when allowing a small reduction
in patient volumes. We furthermore show that solutions are rather robust to data impreciseness and
that long term network planning can bring substantial benefits, particularly in greenfield situations.
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