Incorporating Exercise Efficiency to Evaluate the Accessibility and Capacity of Medical Resources in Tibet, China

Abstract

Accessibility and capacity of medical resources are key for the health care and emergency response, while the efficiency of the medical resources is very much limited by hypoxia in Tibet, China. Through introducing exercise efficiency, this study explores the accessibility of township residence to county-ship medical resources in Tibet using weighted mean travel time (WMT), and evaluates the medical capacity accordingly. The results show that: 1) the average travel time of township residence to county-level hospital is around 2 h by motor vehicle in Tibet. More than half of the population can not reach the county-ship hospital within 1 h, 33.24% of the population can not reach within 2 h, and 3.75% of the population can not reach within 6 h. 2) When considering the catchment of the medical resources and the population size, the WMT of the county-ship medical resources ranges from 0.25 h to 10.92 h. 3) After adjusted by travel time and exercise efficiency, the county-ship medical capacity became more unequal, with 38 out of 74 counties could not meet the national guideline of 1.8 medical beds per 1000. 4) In total, there are 17 counties with good WMT and sufficient medical resources, while 13 counties having very high WMT and low capacity of medical resources in Tibet. In the end, suggestions on medical resources relocation and to improve the capacity are provided. This study provides a method to incorporate exercise efficiency to access the accessibility and evaluate medical capacity that can be applied in high altitude ranges.

Assessing the effects of the large‐scale road construction on the ethnic disparities of accessibility in Tibet from 2010 to 2020

“…Consistent with the findings of existing research, this paper found that both territorial and potential accessibility tend to be unequal, which reveals that there are still many deficiencies in of accessibility in Tibet at the rapid development stage of transportation construction here (Gao et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2022b). However, there is still different from the conclusion that the fairness of accessibility at township level is declining (Gao & Sun, 2022).…”

“…In other words, some indicators related to accessibility in Tibet may have not been included in the model, which needs to be further discovered and demonstrated with the help of clarification of influence path and field research. In the future, we can also further explore the transport accessibility of specific needs such as education or medical services, and then propose more targeted countermeasures (Wang et al., 2022b).…”