Assessing Health Resources Equipped with Hemodynamic Rooms in the Portuguese-Spanish Borderland: Cross-Border Cooperation Strategies as a Possible Solution

Abstract

Portugal and Spain share one of the greatest European borderland areas. This fact has direct impacts on a large territory and consequently on the communities’ living in it. Still, even if the border areas represent an essential fraction of the territory, planning policies have not resulted in specific cooperation programs that could enable sharing general leisure and recreation assets and infrastructures and collaboration in critical domains—i.e., the case of the health sector. The present study aims to assess the territorial accessibility to the hemodynamic rooms by the potential population of the Spanish-Portuguese transition areas that may suffer an acute myocardial infarction. Contextually, this study employed a spatial interaction model based on the three-step floating catchment area method (method-3SFCA). By applying these methods, it was possible to develop a map of accessibility to health infrastructures equipped with hemodynamics rooms on both sides of the border that may answer the Spanish-Portuguese border populations’ needs. Besides, while granting valuable information for decision-makers regarding the need to develop new infrastructures to guarantee that even considering cross border cooperation, everyone gets access to a hemodynamics room within the critical intervention period.

Evaluating Spatial Accessibility to High-Tech Health Services in the Spanish Iberian Peninsula: A GIS-Based Analysis

“…Based on the initial hypothesis of this research, the results obtained indicate that access to high-tech healthcare services for the potential population in demand is satisfactory. These findings are consistent with other studies conducted (Gómez et al, 2018;Gómez et al, 2021), albeit not entirely identical, possibly due to the more recent data utilized in this research.…”

Measuring the Differences of Public Health Service Facilities and Their Influencing Factors

“…As the living standards of people continuously improve, improving people's health levels and realizing medical treatment have also become common pursuits of human society. Medical services are among the most basic needs in human societies and are directly related to people's health [1,2]. Eighty percent of the high-quality medical resources in society as a whole are concentrated in large cities, and 80% of the high-quality medical resources in large cities are concentrated in several high-level hospitals.…”

“…The results provide a decisionmaking basis for optimizing the allocation strategy of medical facilities. (2) The first aid data of patients were collected at each studied hospital. Through spatial statistical analysis and curve-fitting methods, we obtained the first aid service scope among the hospitals and the urban first aid space pattern.…”