Optimal Location of Preventive Health Service Centers for the Temporary Care of Older Adults - A Case Study in the City of Itá-Paraguay

The efficient management of limited resources for public administration translates into more excellent coverage of medical care and prevention in comprehensive, quality care for older people. As this segment of the population continues to grow over the years, optimizing locations would have a significant impact on reducing the maximum distance between potential facilities and beneficiary assignments to meet the most critical possible demand, all within the limitations of budget resources, attention span, and staff efficiency in the context of public health focused on healthy aging. In Paraguay, medical care for the elderly population does not have sufficient coverage to include the necessary comprehensive health services. This work focuses on identifying optimal locations for temporary health services centers in the city of Itá and determining the distribution of demand, the allocation of medical personnel, and the coverage period. A mathematical model was designed based on the Set Coverage Problem (SCP) and the P-Center model, where it is determined that acquiring a mobile health center and temporarily establishing itself in selected neighborhoods is more feasible than building a new healthcare center. For the aforementioned mobile service coverage to be efficient, the designed model showed that the Aveiro, Ka'aguasu, Peguajho, and Tape Tuja neighborhoods of the city of Itá are the optimal locations for the mobile center to travel. Likewise, determine that the total cost of the initial investment to operate the mobile center would represent only 9.6% of the annual budget allocated to the city's district hospital. In this way, the hospital would have a gradually decompressed demand with potential beneficiaries, representing, in principle, 23.4% of the patients who constantly search for medical attention.