Abstract
Health facilities form a central component of health systems, providing curative and preventative services and structured to allow referral through a pyramid of increasingly complex service provision. Access to health care is a complex and multidimensional concept, however, in its most narrow sense, it refers to geographic availability. Linking health facilities to populations has been a traditional per capita index of heath care coverage, however, with locations of health facilities and higher resolution population data, Geographic Information Systems allow for a more refined metric of health access, define geographic inequalities in service provision and inform planning. Maximizing the value of spatial heath access requires a complete census of providers and their locations. To-date there has not been a single, geo-referenced and comprehensive public health facility database for sub-Saharan Africa. We have assembled national master health facility lists from a variety of government and non-government sources from 50 countries and islands in sub Saharan Africa and used multiple geocoding methods to provide a comprehensive spatial inventory of 98,745 public health facilities.
Highlights
Background and SummaryDefining the location of health services in relation to the communities they are intended to serve is the cornerstone of health system planning, ensuring the right services are accessible to the population and that no one is geographically marginalized from essential services
Across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), health services are offered with increasing levels of medical sophistication, from community providers who handle basic care to hospitals which play a critical role in providing emergency care[1,2,3]
This was done through online searches and downloads of Master Facility Lists (MFLs) or maps hosted on the Ministry of Health (MoH) website or on data portals managed by the MoH such as the National Health Map (Carte Sanitaire), health facility registries and online Health Management Information Systems (HMIS) including District Health Information Systems version 2 (DHIS2)
Summary
Defining the location of health services in relation to the communities they are intended to serve is the cornerstone of health system planning, ensuring the right services are accessible to the population and that no one is geographically marginalized from essential services. Across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), health services are offered with increasing levels of medical sophistication, from community providers who handle basic care to hospitals which play a critical role in providing emergency care[1,2,3]. These services are not accessible to everyone [4]. Notwithstanding previous efforts to extract health service providers from OpenStreetMap complimented by volunteered information (https://www.healthsites.io), there is no single, georeferenced and comprehensive public health facility inventory for sub-Saharan Africa. Facility types and numbers for each country were validated using reported data in national health sector strategic plans and other health sector reports
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