Community Healthcare Network in Underserved Areas: Design, Mathematical Models, and Analysis

Cherkesly, Marilène; Rancourt, Marie Ève; Smilowitz, Karen

doi:10.1111/poms.13008

Cited by 20 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 42 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Previous studies in sub-Saharan Africa have estimated geographical accessibility (as travel time) to health facilities at national level 6 7 and CHWs for subnational areas only. [8][9][10][11] The efficiency of geographical targeting of health service locations has been assessed for hospitals in low-income and middle-income countries, but this did not include community health posts or CHWs. 12 In this article, we describe for the first time at national scale the number and geographical distribution of community health posts and CHWs in Niger.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimising geographical accessibility to primary health care: a geospatial analysis of community health posts and community health workers in Niger

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

BackgroundLittle is known about the contribution of community health posts and community health workers (CHWs) to geographical accessibility of primary healthcare (PHC) services at community level and strategies for optimising geographical accessibility to these services.MethodsUsing a complete georeferenced census of community health posts and CHWs in Niger and other high-resolution spatial datasets, we modelled travel times to community health posts and CHWs between 2000 and 2013, accounting for training, commodities and maximum population capacity. We estimated additional CHWs needed to optimise geographical accessibility of the population beyond the reach of the existing community health post network. We assessed the efficiency of geographical targeting of the existing community health post network compared with networks designed to optimise geographical targeting of the estimated population, under-5 deaths and Plasmodium falciparum malaria cases.ResultsThe per cent of the population within 60-minute walking to the nearest community health post with a CHW increased from 0.0% to 17.5% between 2000 and 2013. An estimated 10.4 million people (58.5%) remained beyond a 60-minute catchment of community health posts. Optimal deployment of 7741 additional CHWs could increase geographical coverage from 41.5% to 82.9%. Geographical targeting of the existing community health post network was inefficient but optimised networks could improve efficiency by 32.3%–47.1%, depending on targeting metric.InterpretationsWe provide the first estimates of geographical accessibility to community health posts and CHWs at national scale in Niger, highlighting improvements between 2000 and 2013, geographies where gaps remained and approaches for optimising geographical accessibility to PHC services at community level.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimising geographical accessibility to primary health care: a geospatial analysis of community health posts and community health workers in Niger

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This research builds on food bank operations literature, which primarily studies equity and effectiveness of the routing and scheduling of food collection and delivery to partner agencies. In addition to food bank research, equitable distribution is important in many areas of general operations (Karsu & Morton, 2015) and humanitarian health research (Cherkesly et al., 2019; de Vries et al., 2020; McCoy & Lee, 2014). In general operations, supply chain distribution uncertainty can be attributed to several factors, including supply uncertainty, process uncertainty, and demand uncertainty (Angkiriwang et al., 2014).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Achieving equitable food security: How can food bank mobile pantries fill this humanitarian need

Stauffer

Vanajakumari

Kumar

et al. 2022

Production and Operations Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Hunger occurs in all locations around the globe, from developing to developed countries. In fact, there were over 37 million food insecure individuals (those without access to consistent nutritious food) in the United States in 2018, and this number increased in recent years due to the COVID pandemic. In many countries, food banks are used to consolidate food donations from individuals or government agencies and then provide that food to local partner agencies (such as food pantries and soup kitchens), who distribute it to food insecure individuals. As nonprofit humanitarian organizations, food banks strive to achieve geographic equity in their food distribution, so one area (or county) is not favored over others. However, food banks also want to maximize food distribution with their limited budgets. This equitable distribution versus cost balancing act is made even more challenging since food banks experience extreme variability in both the supply (donations) of food and partner agencies' capacity to deliver food to the food insecure. Our paper focuses on how mobile pantry programs, additional food bank storage capacity, and improved partner agency capacity can be utilized to address this supply and distribution capacity variability while considering food expiration times. Mobile pantry programs allow food banks to distribute food directly to the food insecure by sending their own trucks and employees to locations where food is most needed. Although all three of these approaches can be helpful, our results show that mobile pantries are a more effective approach to achieve high equity levels. This is especially true in the case of produce with relatively short expiration times. We also find that utilizing mobile pantry programs can increase equitable partner agency distribution considerably, because even small amounts of mobile pantry distribution in under-served areas allow for more equitable partner agency distribution in areas with available partner agency distribution capacity. Our research is based on data from our partner food bank, but our modeling and extensive sensitivity analysis should be applicable to many food banks with a similar collection and distribution structure.

show abstract

“…Vanajakumari et al (2016) proposed an integrated model to determine the locations of staging areas and routing of relief trucks to reduce the response time of delivering relief to victims. Cherkesly et al (2019) studied a community healthcare network to determine the number and routing of community healthcare workers and supervisors. They formulated it as a location‐routing problem and proposed three heuristics to reduce the solving time.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robustifying humanitarian relief systems against travel time uncertainty

Zhang

Liu

et al. 2021

Naval Research Logistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We consider a class of last mile distribution problems with multicenters and multiareas in disaster management, where the travel time for every pair of center‐area is uncertain. We propose a chance‐constrained model to handle this problem, which simultaneously determines the selection of emergency logistics centers (ELCs), the amount of relief transported to these ELCs, the allocation and routing of vehicles, and the equitable distribution of emergency materials from the ELCs to the disaster areas. We develop a distributionally robust optimization (DRO) model to reformulate the chance‐constraint model as a second‐order cone programming, which the proposed algorithm can solve efficiently. We present a case study of the Yushu earthquake in the Qinghai Province of the People's Republic of China to demonstrate the performance of our proposed model and method. The results reveal that (1) the DRO method outperforms the scenario‐based model in reducing cost and improving reliability, (2) deploying a large number of vehicles in the emergency centers near disaster areas can reduce cost, and (3) our proposed model evenly distributes vehicles on paths to curtail the rescue time.

show abstract

Community Healthcare Network in Underserved Areas: Design, Mathematical Models, and Analysis

Cited by 20 publications

References 42 publications

Optimising geographical accessibility to primary health care: a geospatial analysis of community health posts and community health workers in Niger

Optimising geographical accessibility to primary health care: a geospatial analysis of community health posts and community health workers in Niger

Achieving equitable food security: How can food bank mobile pantries fill this humanitarian need

Robustifying humanitarian relief systems against travel time uncertainty

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About