Comparing Three GIS Techniques for Modelling Geographical Access to General Practitioners

Abstract

Accessibility to health services is a social and economic issue that has many dimensions. This article compares three techniques for measuring geographical accessibility to general practitioners (family doctors). These techniques can be described as ratio, least-cost path, and allocation methods. The ratio method is the most common and simply measures the population-to-GP ratio for a given area. The least-cost path and allocation techniques rely on GIS network analysis and provide information on travel times and distances. The allocation analysis differs from least-cost path analyses because it considers the number of GPs available and this acts as a capacity constraint. The use of GIS network analysis can produce a number of different statistics on accessibility that can be visualized as a map. This article will argue that the use of a capacity constraint is important and that the population further than 30 minutes from a GP is an effective statistic for comparing the accessibility of different management regions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.