The sustainability of a community nurses programme in mountain areas: a Directional Distance Function approach

Authors adopt the Directional Distance Function (DDF) to stratify the efficiency of municipalities in supporting an active and healthy ageing, considering their current available financial resources. According to the proposed target, we aim at proposing an algorithm that could be able to identify all those municipalities with necessities of interventions by the proposed innovative health care program. In details, authors will focus on less efficient municipalities in order to estimate the necessary expenses in order to improve the quality of life in these areas. Moreover, authors adopt a stratification in geographical areas based on altitude, supposing that the geographical location can considerably affect the municipalities' efficiency in supporting active ageing. Concluding, the adoption of the altitude to stratify DMUs can produce different populations and authors consider this value as a key element to estimate properly the inefficiency. Indeed, the altitude can affect the difficultness of these elderly in the aging process, as well as the municipalities in supporting an active and healthy aging process. Note that, according to the collected results, the Regional Health Care System can identify all those municipalities in which the intervention is necessary.