The Location Problem. Addressing Decisions About Healthcare Facilities

The location of healthcare facilities is commonly considered as an ill-structured decision problem since characterized by the coexistence of several and sometimes conflictual criteria, the presence of different stakolders with their own viewpoints and the necessity to find a trade-off among dimensions involved. Given these premises the contribution is aimed at proposing a detailed analysis of the State of the Art (SoA) of the location problem under investigation through a deep review of scientific papers, existing evaluation tools and the researches focused on solving the hospital’s site selection. The main purpose of this chapter is to underline existing gaps on this decision problem in order to define an evaluation approach useful to structure a multidimensional framework. In fact, the analysis of the SoA has been developed in order to highlight how previous researches managed the decision problem by pointing out methodologies applied, software used and in particular criteria defined.