Day and night location planning for general practitioners

Primary care plays a vital role in the health care system. Challenges in accessing primary care is a growing area of concern globally, with demonstrated negative patient and health system outcomes. Patient and physician preferences for both location and daytime/afterhours access differ. Determining the location of primary care practices that meet the needs of both patients and physicians is a complex optimization problem with multiple criteria.

The specific objectives of the project are to develop a framework to measure and evaluate how well primary care practices cover a population. This will be considered from the physician and patient perspectives and differentiated by daytime versus afterhours needs. Using this framework, we will develop an Operations Research model to recommend an optimal practice network.

The proposed research builds upon collaborations between Dalhousie University and KIT. This project will support applied case studies based on German and Nova Scotia primary care networks.

Faculty Supervisor:

Peter VanBerkel

Student:

Partner:

Karlsruher Institut für Technologie

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Education

University:

Dalhousie University

Program: