Assessing patients' accessibility to primary care: The Italian community-based reform of territorial medicine

Italy is seeking to reinforce territorial medicine through the establishment of Community Healthcare Centers (CHCs). This paper investigates how CHCs contribute to healthcare accessibility. By leveraging a comprehensive dataset of General Practitioners’ (GPs) and estimating supply and demand future scenarios, we examine their impact under two strategies. Strategy 1 - Capacity expansion, involves allocating GPs’ additional service hours in CHCs to maximize accessibility. Strategy 2 - Capacity redistribution reallocates a portion of GPs’ current services from their existing workplace locations to CHCs. Results indicate that CHCs can potentially maintain (and even enhance) current accessibility levels in the years to come.