A Multicriteria Ranking of Thessaloniki’s Public Hospitals Based on Their Infrastructure Adequacy

Abstract

The Healthy Cities project of the World Health Organization (WHO) is a global movement. It engages local governments in health development. There are many national Healthy Cities networks, and a large number of cities in Greece have already joined them. Meanwhile, especially in big cities like Thessaloniki, health infrastructures are very old and operationally and spatially suffocate. The current research thoroughly records the health infrastructure in Macedonia and Thrace. Data clearly highlights that the major “healthcare issues” are concentrated in Thessaloniki. Hospitals operate in old buildings with urgent need for reconstruction and a definite need for expansion. A methodology for identifying a hospitals’ priority list is presented and applied taking into account the age of buildings, the building area/per bed, the field area/per bed, the coverage of beds, and the population being served. PROMETHEE methodology is implemented to rank healthcare units, on the basis of the urgency for improvement action. According to the analysis’ results, the hospitals in Thessaloniki that require immediate attention, considering their infrastructure, are “Theagenio” Anticancer Hospital, Psychiatric Hospital, and “St. Paul” General Hospital. Various improvement actions were proposed including expansion of hospitals in adjacent land and buildings, transfer of specific clinics to new buildings within the city, relocation of certain healthcare activities or part of them to new hospitals on the outskirts of city, upgrading of primary healthcare, and reinforcement of neuralgic hospitals in other prefectures. Finally, a discussion about the appropriateness of each type of intervention per hospital is presented.