|
|
|
| THE SPATIAL ACCESSIBILITY ANALYSIS OF RURAL MEDICAL FACILITIES BASED ON GIS: A CASE STUDY OF LANKAO COUNTY, HENAN PROVINCE |
| WU Jian-jun1, KONG Yun-feng2,3, LI Bin3 |
1. College of Management Science, Kaifeng University, Kaifeng 475004, China;
2. China-Australia Cooperative Research Institute of Geographical Information Analysis and Applications, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, China;
3. College of Environment & Planning, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, China |
|
|
|
|
Abstract Both equality and efficiency are critical issues on assessing and planning of public facilities, especially for the rural areas in developing countries. Considering the uneven spatial distribution of medical facilities in rural China, this paper aims to assess the equality of rural medical services by introducing geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial accessibility indexes. Lankao County of Henna Province is selected as a study area. For its medical resources, there are 21 township and county-level hospitals with 625 licensed doctors, 2517 nurses and technical employees, 2015 beds and 328 costly medical equipment. The general data, such as administration boundary, transportation network, remote sensing image, and village's name, location and population, are gathered from government authorities. The statistics of township and county-level hospitals, including hospital name, location, number of doctors, nurses, technicians and hospital beds, and major medical facilities, are collected from the Bureau of Medical Management, Lankao County.
Using ESRI's ArcGIS software, the authors have created four map layers of administration boundary, demographics, medical facilities and transportation networks. The village-level indexes of spatial accessibility to the township and county-level hospitals, in terms of provider-to-population ratio, distance to nearest provider, number of neighbor providers, gravity model and improved gravity model, are calculated in ArcGIS 9.2 software. The statistics, map visualization and spatial analysis of these indexes for every village show that there exists quite different accessibility in the study area. The areal and locational medical accessibility and equality are discussed systematically; especially the locations with weak medical services are identified. The research results can be used for local medical planning, resources allocation and reallocation of some hospitals. Based on this case study, the authors argue that the GIS technology and spatial accessibility are the essential tools for assessing not only the spatial equality of rural medical facilities, but also potentials in the service planning and resource allocation in rural medical reforms. Furthermore, a practical GIS system for medical facility planning can be developed by deliberating the accessibility models and utilizing more geographic and socioeconomic data.
|
|
Received: 25 August 2007
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2008, Vol. 23 
