The socio-economic planning of a community nurses programme in mountain areas: A Directional Distance Function approach

This manuscript focuses on the sustainability of a European Union project, funded by the Alpine Space Programme. This project aims to develop an innovative care model based on community nurses to support municipalities in promoting active and healthy ageing. Adopting the Directional Distance Function, our work sets out to propose a specific score able to identify all those municipalities that are inefficient in supporting the ageing process through the coordination of socio-economic interventions. According to the estimated scores, policy makers can make more rational use of the available resources, implementing the innovative treatments where it is most necessary. In this way, the achievements of this European Union project can be maintained for the sake of the next generation, avoiding its collapse as soon as funding shifts to new programmes.