Catchments of general practice in different countries– a literature review

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to review the current research on catchment areas of private general practices in different developed countries because healthcare reform, including primary health care, has featured prominently as an important political issue in a number of developed countries. The debates around health reform have had a significant health geographic focus.Conceptually, GP catchments describe the distribution, composition and profile of patients who access a general practitioner or a general practice (i.e. a site or facility comprising one or more general practitioners). Therefore, GP catchments provide important information into the geographic variation of access rates, utilisation of services and health outcomes by all of the population or different population groups in a defined area or aggregated area.This review highlights a wide range of diversity in the literature as to how GP catchments can be described, the indicators and measures used to frame the scale of catchments. Patient access to general practice health care services should be considered from a range of locational concepts, and not necessarily constrained by their place of residence. An analysis of catchment patterns of general practitioners should be considered as dynamic and multi-perspective. Geographic information systems provide opportunities to contribute valuable methodologies to study these relationships. However, researchers acknowledge that a conceptual framework for the analysis of GP catchments requires access to real world data. Recent studies have shown promising developments in the use of real world data, especially from studies in the UK.Understanding the catchment profiles of individual GP surgeries is important if governments are serious about patient choice being a key part of proposed primary health reforms. Future health planning should incorporate models of GP catchments as planning tools, at the micro level as well as the macro level, to assist policies on the allocation of resources so that opportunities for good health outcomes for all groups within society, especially those who have been systematically denied equitable access, are maximised.

Spatial Accessibility of Primary Care in England: A Cross‐Sectional Study Using a Floating Catchment Area Method

“…In our study, we demonstrated varying effective catchment sizes with larger catchment sizes in less urban areas ( r = −0.76; p <.001). However, defining catchment sizes depends on a variety of factors, including international differences as well as differences due to health care systems (Allan ). Regarding market sizes as reported above, Dunn et al.…”

“…However, such simplifications of catchment areas have strong limitations compared to the present approach, especially because they are insensitive for congestive areas with more than one GP available (Guagliardo ). Still, the general necessity of both (distance decay and variable catchment sizes) is well described in the literature along with a general lack of valid empirical data to support the appropriate choice (Luo and Qi ; Wang ; Allan ). Furthermore, public transport as modeled within our study (BUS) has limitations, since public transport includes a walking part (from and to bus stops) and official time schedules.…”

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

“…This reduces methodological inaccuracies because the DAs used are smaller and more uniformly sized than neighbourhoods. In the case of this research employs a more moderate distance of 3km (in the first two steps of the method used; using road network to generate a catchment area) [50, 77, 78], based on the premise that local (i.e., neighbourhood) access to primary care is important if not universally put into practice during the family doctor selection process (see [79]). Research reported that utilization of alternative health care facilities over regular family physician in urban areas is observed when distance from place of residence to family physician practice is more than 3 km [50].…”

Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and Primary Health Care: Usual Points of Access and Temporal Trends in a Major US Urban Area

“…Examining finer geographic variations in provider supply, characteristics, and preferential localization (e.g., concentration around tertiary care centers) can thus be very informative. Recent advances in floating catchment area (FCA) methods [79][80][81] (e.g., using a three-step FCA [82][83][84] or utilizing a dynamic catchment size 85 ) to characterize spatial access to care in neighborhoods' local areas appear to be particularly promising.…”