Intraurban physician location: A case study of Phoenix

Gober, Patricia; Gordon, Rena J.

doi:10.1016/0160-8002(80)90009-x

Cited by 15 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…This is not surprising given the attractiveness of the city center for economic activities. Our results concord with those reported in previous studies [47-49]. How may this location place be explained particularly in the Canadian context where healthcare is free of charge for all citizens?…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Optimizing the two-step floating catchment area method for measuring spatial accessibility to medical clinics in Montreal

Ngui

Apparicio

2011

BMC Health Serv Res

112

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BackgroundReducing spatial access disparities to healthcare services is a growing priority for healthcare planners especially among developed countries with aging populations. There is thus a pressing need to determine which populations do not enjoy access to healthcare, yet efforts to quantify such disparities in spatial accessibility have been hampered by a lack of satisfactory measurements and methods. This study compares an optimised and the conventional version of the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method to assess spatial accessibility to medical clinics in Montreal.MethodsWe first computed catchments around existing medical clinics of Montreal Island based on the shortest network distance. Population nested in dissemination areas were used to determine potential users of a given medical clinic. To optimize the method, medical clinics (supply) were weighted by the number of physicians working in each clinic, while the previous year's medical clinic users were computed by ten years age group was used as weighting coefficient for potential users of each medical clinic (demand).ResultsThe spatial accessibility score (SA) increased considerably with the optimisation method. Within a distance of 1 Km, for instance, the maximum clinic accessible for 1,000 persons is 2.4 when the conventional method is used, compared with 27.7 for the optimized method. The t-test indicates a significant difference between the conventional and the optimized 2SFCA methods. Also, results of the differences between the two methods reveal a clustering of residuals when distance increases. In other words, a low threshold would be associated with a lack of precision.ConclusionResults of this study suggest that a greater effort must be made ameliorate spatial accessibility to medical clinics in Montreal. To ensure that health resources are allocated in the interest of the population, health planners and the government should consider a strategy in the sitting of future clinics which would provide spatial access to the greatest number of people.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Optimizing the two-step floating catchment area method for measuring spatial accessibility to medical clinics in Montreal

Ngui

Apparicio

2011

BMC Health Serv Res

112

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“…It has been suggested that this may be the result of the need to attract customers, where access to high quality technical services may prove important. Gober and Gordon (1980) in a study of Phoenix also found such clustering among specialists. This was particularly the case for paediatricians, and they suggested that proximity to good quality facilities in hospitals may be more important than proximity to patients for specialist medicine, and more so as medicine becomes more technologically sophisticated.…”

Section: The Spatial Distribution Of Health Servicesmentioning

confidence: 69%

“…Such studies have been carried out in most of the major cities of the developed world (Marden, 1967;Stimson, 1975Stimson, , 1981Gober and Gordon, 1980). And although cross-national comparisons of health service studies are more problematic than cross-national comparisons of associative studies, due to the marked variations between countries in the structure of their health services (Roemer, 1977), such comparisons are important in highlighting latent mechanisms in our own health care system.…”

Section: The Spatial Distribution Of Health Servicesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Area and Health in Cities: A Review of the Literature

Mullen

1990

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy

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In this paper I will analyse the nature of the relationship between area and health in cities. Although it has long been known that mortality and morbidity are unevenly distributed within urban environments (Stamp, 1964; Learmonth, 1988) it remains problematic as to how these differences should be explained. In the present paper I will present detailed information on the spatial distibution of mortality, morbidity, and health services in cities and consider the explanations which have been put forward to account for them. Research which has considered this topic covers various fields; medical geography, medical ecology, epidemiology, and sociology, and has utilised numerous methodological approaches, from straightforward mapping techniques to complex multi‐variate analysis. Research has also been carried out across the world. However, because differences in the political and social organisation of cities can have an effect on health, and these structural differences vary from country to country, I have restricted the current review to work carried out in the cities of the developed world as studies are more comparable.

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“…5). In Phoenix, medical practitioners are highly concentrated in a central medical distict and in proximity to major hospitals (Gober and Gordon, 1980). The highly decentralized employment structure in Phoenix provided the most telling challenge for the Urban Village Concept (Fig.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%