Optimal home healthcare centre configurations under demographic changes in Andøy commune

Demographic changes impact home healthcare in rural areas, where the ageing population living at home longer is found in combination with a decreasing population size, which reduces availability of home healthcare nurses. We introduce a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) for the advised configurations of home healthcare centres (HHCs) over time, taking into account the effect of demographic changes, where configuration refers to both the number of HHCs and their locations, and advised is used to reflect that the optimal MILP solution is subject to simplifying modelling assumptions and an optimality gap. Our MILP falls in the class of location-routeing problems with weighted objective function that contains components for the duration of the routes, the commute time of nurses, the costs of establishing HHCs in new locations, the maximum travel time to patients in emergency situations, and nurse shortages. We apply our results to determine the advised HHC configurations for Andøy kommune for the years 2015–2050.