An Lp Planning Model for a Mental Health Community Support System

In this paper we develop a resource planning and allocation model for a mental-health community-support system. The intent of the model is to provide a tool to system managers and planners to address the relevant tradeoffs with regard to resource planning and allocation. More and more, mental health care is being delivered by a variety of community-based service agencies instead of total institutions. Furthermore, the service needs of a client population are continually changing, and depend upon the relative functioning of the population, which depends upon the efficacy of the services provided. Finally, the availability of resources is becoming scarcer, and is more closely scrutinized. Consequently, the system manager is faced with a very complex planning problem in which the manager must attempt to apply the available resources as effectively as possible. To make the model operational we develop a conceptual framework for aggregating patients according to their functional level and service needs, and for specifying "service packages" that are available to the aggregate patient groups. We also estimate probabilistically the effect of giving a particular service package to a patient group, in terms of functional improvement or regression. We view the planning problem then as the assignment of service packages to aggregate groups over a multi-period planning horizon so as to not exceed the available resource levels while maximizing s'^me measure of system welfare. For this framework we can then formulate the planning problem as a very large, linear programming problem. We are currently exploring the validity of the conceptual framework and the applicability of the LP model by doing small case studies for the mental health planning agencies of several states.