Design of logistic criteria to establish healthcare facilities in vulnerable regions in Mexico

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), health inequities refer to those dimensional, measurable, and avoidable differences between socially, economically, demographically, or geographically defined population groups. In Mexico, despite several advances in health services and infrastructure, there are health inequities in rural communities, particularly those with indigenous population. These communities have limited or non-existent healthcare facilities, medical equipment, transport infrastructure, medicines, and human resources such as doctors and nurses. In this work, a conceptual design of a healthcare network is proposed to serve a region with several rural communities with limited healthcare resources. The designed network allocates rural communities to the most appropriate facilities based on (a) a vulnerability community index, and (b) a facility service index. The application of the conceptual network led to a hierarchical referral scheme between communities and different types of healthcare facilities to improve medical services and infrastructure planning. These results can support the decisions aimed to expand already existent facilities, replace multiple basic facilities with an appropriate number of larger and more advanced facilities, and determine the transportation infrastructure required to reach these facilities.