Simulating the impact of centralization of prostate cancer surgery services on travel burden and equity in the English National Health Service: A national population based model for health service re-design.

The study provides an innovative simulation approach using national patient-level datasets, patient preferences based on actual hospital selections, and personal characteristics to inform health service planning. With this approach, we demonstrated for prostate cancer surgery that three different centralization scenarios would lead to similar number of center closures but to different increases in patient travel time, whilst all having a minimal impact on equity.