Priorities and Allocation of Health Care Resources in Developing Countries: A Case-study from the Mtwara region, Tanzania
Author(s)
Flessa, Steffen
Abstract
Models of health economics usually maximize the sum of individual health. However, as the term health reflects very different aspects of well being, quite different objectives can be derived for the allocation of health care resources. This paper analyses the optimum allocation of health care resources in the Mtwara region, Tanzania, for five different objectives: minimization of death cases, minimization of years of life lost, minimization of incidence, minimization of prevalence and minimization of loss of quality of life. For this purpose a linear program is developed. The different objective functions lead to completely different proposals of how to allocate health care resources. Therefore, the results of this paper call for a new discussion of health care priorities in developing countries.
