Improving patients' accessibility to primary care services: the Italian reorganization of territorial medicine

Abstract Ensuring widespread access to healthcare services is a crucial policy objective. The Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) has notably prioritized territorial medicine, channeling post-pandemic investments towards the restructuring of primary care services. A significant change involved the establishment of Community Healthcare Centers (CHCs). This paper investigates how CHCs contribute to accessibility to healthcare in urban and rural areas. By leveraging a comprehensive dataset of general practitioners’ availability and estimating supply and demand future scenarios, we examine the impact of CHCs under two different capacity allocation strategies. Strategy 1—Capacity expansion—involves allocating additional service hours of general practitioners in CHCs to maximize accessibility. Strategy 2—Capacity redistribution—accounts for the persisting shortage of healthcare professionals faced by Italy in recent years, thereby reallocating a portion of general practitioners’ current services from their existing workplace locations to CHCs. Our results indicate that CHCs have the potential to maintain current accessibility levels and even enhance them in the years to come. Moreover, we demonstrate that even redistributing current capacity can improve future accessibility.