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Spatial Accessibility to Health Care Services: Identifying under-Serviced Neighbourhoods in Canadian Urban Areas

PloS one, 2016-12, Vol.11 (12), p.e0168208-e0168208 [Peer Reviewed Journal]

COPYRIGHT 2016 Public Library of Science ;COPYRIGHT 2016 Public Library of Science ;2016 Shah et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License. ;2016 Shah et al 2016 Shah et al ;ISSN: 1932-6203 ;EISSN: 1932-6203 ;DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0168208 ;PMID: 27997577

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Title:
Spatial Accessibility to Health Care Services: Identifying under-Serviced Neighbourhoods in Canadian Urban Areas
Author: Shah, Tayyab Ikram ; Bell, Scott ; Wilson, Kathi
Codeço, Claudia Torres
Subjects: Accessibility ; Buses ; Canada ; Canada Health Act ; Catchment areas ; Catchments ; Censuses ; Central business districts ; Colleges & universities ; Correlation analysis ; Earth Sciences ; Emergency medical care ; Emergency medical services ; Epidemiology ; Family Practice ; Female ; Floating ; Forecasts and trends ; Geography ; Health care ; Health care access ; Health care services accessibility ; Health facilities ; Health services ; Health Services Accessibility ; Humans ; Location ; Male ; Management ; Maternal & child health ; Medical personnel ; Medical research ; Medical screening ; Medicine and Health Sciences ; Older people ; People and Places ; Physicians ; Population ; Primary care ; Public health ; Research and Analysis Methods ; Social Sciences ; Studies ; Surgeons ; Urban areas ; Urban environments ; Urban health ; Urban Health Services ; Urban Renewal
Is Part Of: PloS one, 2016-12, Vol.11 (12), p.e0168208-e0168208
Description: Urban environments can influence many aspects of health and well-being and access to health care is one of them. Access to primary health care (PHC) in urban settings is a pressing research and policy issue in Canada. Most research on access to healthcare is focused on national and provincial levels in Canada; there is a need to advance current understanding to local scales such as neighbourhoods. This study examines spatial accessibility to family physicians using the Three-Step Floating Catchment Area (3SFCA) method to identify neighbourhoods with poor geographical access to PHC services and their spatial patterning across 14 Canadian urban settings. An index of spatial access to PHC services, representing an accessibility score (physicians-per-1000 population), was calculated for neighborhoods using a 3km road network distance. Information about primary health care providers (this definition does not include mobile services such as health buses or nurse practitioners or less distributed services such as emergency rooms) used in this research was gathered from publicly available and routinely updated sources (i.e. provincial colleges of physicians and surgeons). An integrated geocoding approach was used to establish PHC locations. The results found that the three methods, Simple Ratio, Neighbourhood Simple Ratio, and 3SFCA that produce City level access scores are positively correlated with each other. Comparative analyses were performed both within and across urban settings to examine disparities in distributions of PHC services. It is found that neighbourhoods with poor accessibility scores in the main urban settings across Canada have further disadvantages in relation to population high health care needs. The results of this study show substantial variations in geographical accessibility to PHC services both within and among urban areas. This research enhances our understanding of spatial accessibility to health care services at the neighbourhood level. In particular, the results show that the low access neighbourhoods tend to be clustered in the neighbourhoods at the urban periphery and immediately surrounding the downtown area.
Publisher: United States: Public Library of Science
Language: English
Identifier: ISSN: 1932-6203
EISSN: 1932-6203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0168208
PMID: 27997577
Source: GFMER Free Medical Journals
MEDLINE
PubMed Central
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
ProQuest Central
DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals

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Spatial Accessibility to Health Care Services: Identifying under-Serviced Neighbourhoods in Canadian Urban Areas

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