Spatial Accessibility to Primary Healthcare Services by Multimodal Means of Travel: Synthesis and Case Study in the City of Calgary

Abstract

Universal access to primary healthcare facilities is a driving goal of healthcare organizations. Despite Canada’s universal access to primary healthcare status, spatial accessibility to healthcare facilities is still an issue of concern due to the non-uniform distribution of primary healthcare facilities and population over space—leading to spatial inequity in the healthcare sector. Spatial inequity is further magnified when health-related accessibility studies are analyzed on the assumption of universal car access. To overcome car-centric studies of healthcare access, this study compares different travel modes—driving, public transit, and walking—to simulate the multi-modal access to primary healthcare services in the City of Calgary, Canada. Improving on floating catchment area methods, spatial accessibility was calculated based on the Spatial Access Ratio method, which takes into consideration the provider-to-population status of the region. The analysis revealed that, in the City of Calgary, spatial accessibility to the primary healthcare services is the highest for the people with an access to a car, and is significantly lower with multimodal (bus transit and train) means despite being a large urban centre. The social inequity issue raised from this analysis can be resolved by improving the city’s pedestrian infrastructure, public transportation, and construction of new clinics in regions of low accessibility.

Evaluating the Spatial Accessibility and Distribution Balance of Multi-Level Medical Service Facilities

“…More recently, the method of two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) was first proposed in the early 2000s and has been widely applied in spatial accessibility measurements in multiple fields, including retail allocation, land use planning and public service facility evaluation [15,16,25]. Furthermore, the 2SFCA method has been modified since then, and the modified 2SFCA method has been proven to be more efficient than the original method [13,26,27,28,29,30,31,32]. In addition, some approaches also analyzed the possible reasons leading to certain accessibility distributions [7,33,34,35].…”

Geographic accessibility to primary care providers: Comparing rural and urban areas in Southwestern Ontario

“…The Canada Health Act sets out the conditions for the provincial and territorial governments to provide reasonable access to medically necessary hospital and doctor services, including primary health care (Canada ). Despite having a universal health care system, many Canadians still experience difficulty in accessing primary care services (Reid et al ; Paez et al ; Crooks and Schuurman ; Shah et al ; Kaur Khakh et al ). A retrospective analysis of administrative health data in Ontario highlights that “just over two‐thirds of primary care physicians provided comprehensive care in 2014/15, which indicates that traditional estimates of the primary physician workforce may be too high” (Schultz and Glazier , E856).…”

Rapidly measuring spatial accessibility of COVID-19 healthcare resources: a case study of Illinois, USA

“…Measuring spatial accessibility to healthcare resources has long been of interest to public health research. Examples include healthcare access for seniors [ 16 , 17 ], disabled people [ 18 ], cancer-specific survivals [ 19 , 20 ], examining spatial accessibility among populations with multiple transportation modes [ 21 , 22 ], and access to specific health care treatments such as mammograms [ 23 ]. Spatial accessibility of healthcare resources can be measured by spatial interactions between the amount of supplies (e.g., the number of hospital beds or physicians) and demands along with the distance and travel time between the locations of healthcare resources and those of residential areas.…”