Using Geographic Information Systems to investigate variations in accessibility to ‘extended hours’ primary healthcare provision

Abstract

There are ongoing policy concerns surrounding the difficulty in obtaining timely appointments to primary healthcare services and the potential impact on, for example, attendance at accident and emergency services and potential health outcomes. Using the case study of potential access to primary healthcare services in Wales, Geographic Information System (GIS)‐based tools that permit a consideration of population‐to‐provider ratios over space are used to examine variations in geographical accessibility to general practitioner (GP) surgeries offering appointment times outside of ‘core’ operating hours. Correlation analysis is used to explore the association of accessibility scores with potential demand for such services using UK Population Census data. Unlike the situation in England, there is a tendency for accessibility to those surgeries offering ‘extended’ hours of appointment times to be better for more deprived census areas in Wales. However, accessibility to surgeries offering appointments in the evening was associated with lower levels of working age population classed as ‘economically active’; that is, those who could be targeted beneficiaries of policies geared towards ‘extended’ appointment hours provision. Such models have the potential to identify spatial mismatches of different facets of primary healthcare, such as ‘extended’ hours provision available at GP surgeries, and are worthy of further investigation, especially in relation to policies targeted at particular demographic groups.

Hospital Site Suitability Assessment Using Three Machine Learning Approaches: Evidence from the Gaza Strip in Palestine

“…Central to improving healthcare service delivery in the region under study is the issue of location. A suitably located hospital addresses important issues such as accessibility within a reasonable distance and time at a reasonable cost, availability of space that meets current service operational capacity and, at the same time, accommodates future development/emergency needs, capability for the projected target service population, and delivering community obligations [2][3][4]. From the forego, it is obvious that finding suitable sites for locating a hospital is a multicriteria problem that has numerous fundamental societal factors to be considered for the maximum benefit.…”

Risk and space: modelling the accessibility of stroke centers using day- & nighttime population distribution and different transportation scenarios

“…the temporal accessibility to the nearest facility rather than availability [ 24 , 49 ]. There are other methods, mostly based on 2SFCA approaches, which also consider availability (Fransen et al [ 22 ], Higgs et al [ 27 ], Chen et al [ 16 ]).…”

Two-Step Floating Catchment Area Model-Based Evaluation of Community Care Facilities’ Spatial Accessibility in Xi’an, China

“…In recent years, optimization methods have been applied to the research of urban facility planning [ 45 , 46 , 47 ] and the Geographic Information System (GIS) approach has been widely used [ 11 , 48 , 49 ]. Nishino, T. (2017) explored the quantitative properties of the macro supply and demand structure for facilities for the elderly who require support or long-term care throughout Japan and they presented these properties as an index value [ 47 ].…”

“…Nishino, T. (2017) explored the quantitative properties of the macro supply and demand structure for facilities for the elderly who require support or long-term care throughout Japan and they presented these properties as an index value [ 47 ]. Higgs, G. et al (2019) evaluated the potential access to primary healthcare services in Wales using GIS-based tools to examine variations in geographical accessibility to general practitioner (GP) surgeries offering appointment times outside of “core” operating hours [ 49 ]. The two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) model and the potential model are also widely used in spatial accessibility evaluations, especially of medical resources [ 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 ].…”

“…Planning methods of institutional and medical facilities are well studied in previous research [ 43 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 ]. This study focuses on community care facilities, which have different service radii and characteristics compared to the other care facilities.…”