Minimizing patient travel in medically desertified areas by using mobile dental buses
Résumé
Fighting against medical deserts is a priority for the French government. Many doctors are retiring in areas where few replacements are coming to take over because of a mission that leaves little room for personal life and where communities are short of educational and leisure facilities.
Faced with such a situation, professional health structures that bring together doctors, pharmacists, nurses, etc. are a concrete response in communities with several thousand inhabitants. However, many small villages are still in serious need of medical services.
Health buses, such as dental buses, allow private or hired doctors to provide care in isolated and/or medically depopulated communities or neighborhoods. By reaching out to the elderly or isolated people's requests for care, a real societal contribution can be put in place if the care providers adhere to it.
We are particularly interested here in the use of mobile dental buses. A bus equipped with dental equipment travels to the patients. The patients are treated on the bus by a dentist assisted by an assistant. The problem we seek to solve is to determine where to position the bus and when in order to treat the maximum number of patients while minimizing their travel.
We propose a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) to solve this problem. The solution method is applied to a real case study in a region of France (Drôme).