Combining Transportation Network Models with Kernel Density Methods to Measure the Relative Spatial Accessibility of Pediatric Primary Care Services in Jefferson County, Kentucky

Abstract

When considering access to healthcare, the question of whether the provider is available and accessible must be answered before the question of cost. Most contemporary techniques of estimating the spatial accessibility of healthcare cannot simultaneously take into account transportation times and the spatially distributed service capacity of healthcare providers. This paper creates the Comprehensive Spatial Accessibility Rank (CSAR) model to calculate a relative estimate of spatial accessibility that can account for both public and private transportation and the spatial distribution of a service provider's capacity for service in relation to the distribution of a study area's population. It uses data for Jefferson County, Kentucky to show how the CSAR model could be used to identify possible disparities in accessing pediatric primary healthcare services. The CSAR model is able to detect relative disparities between defined subpopulations and or geographic regions, allowing for the comparison of the effects of physical infrastructure in access.

Measuring Accessibility of Healthcare Facilities for Populations with Multiple Transportation Modes Considering Residential Transportation Mode Choice

“…In 2016, the State Health and Family Planning Commission of China issued guidelines for strengthening the reform and development of children's medical and healthcare services (http://www.mohrss.gov.cn/SYrlzyhshbzb/shehuibaozhang/zcwj/yiliao/ 201606/t20160601_241098.html). The spatial accessibility of PCS is one of the typical and meaningful issues within research on the accessibility of healthcare services [72][73][74], which prompted us to choose PCS as the research object.…”

Measuring spatiotemporal accessibility for pediatric clinical services with multimodal transport modes: an exploratory analysis in Nanjing, China

“…In 2016, the State Health and Family Planning Commission of China issued guidelines for strengthening the reform and development of children's medical and healthcare services1. The spatial accessibility of PCS is one of the typical and meaningful issues within research on the accessibility of healthcare services (Guagliardo, Ronzio, Cheung, Chacko, & Joseph, 2004;Nieves, 2015;Nobles, Serban, & Swann, 2014), which prompts us to choose PCS as the research object.…”

Measuring Spatial Patterns of Health Care Facilities and Their Relationships with Hypertension Inpatients in a Network-Constrained Urban System

“…Potential access focuses on the spatial distribution of health care services, while realized access refers to the actual use of services [12,15]. Many barriers impede the progression from potential to realized access, and spatial accessibility emphasizes the importance of spatial separation between supply and demand, and how they are connected in geographical space [13,16], which is generally accepted as a basis for optimizing the allocation of health care resources in urban areas [12,17]. Factors affecting health care spatial accessibility include the location of health care services, and how services will be reached [15].…”

“…Therefore, Euclidean-based methods, which are designed for events occurring on a continuous plane, may not be suitable for characterizing network-constrained point events [25,28,29]. Furthermore, the distance to a health care provider along the road network was recognized as a significant factor affecting the equality of health care accessibility [16,30]. In recent years, many researchers have made significant progress by extending planar spatial analysis methods to network-contrained point events, such as by using the network Kernel density estimation [28,31,32] and network K-function [26,33,34].…”