Assessing Health Resources Equipped with Hemodynamic Rooms in the Portuguese-Spanish Borderland: Cross-Border Cooperation Strategies as a Possible Solution

José Manuel Naranjo Gómez,Luís Loures,José Cabezas Fernández,Rui Alexandre Castanho

doi:10.3390/ijgi10080514

Abstract

Portugal and Spain share one of the greatest European borderland areas. This fact has direct impacts on a large territory and consequently on the communities’ living in it. Still, even if the border areas represent an essential fraction of the territory, planning policies have not resulted in specific cooperation programs that could enable sharing general leisure and recreation assets and infrastructures and collaboration in critical domains—i.e., the case of the health sector. The present study aims to assess the territorial accessibility to the hemodynamic rooms by the potential population of the Spanish-Portuguese transition areas that may suffer an acute myocardial infarction. Contextually, this study employed a spatial interaction model based on the three-step floating catchment area method (method-3SFCA). By applying these methods, it was possible to develop a map of accessibility to health infrastructures equipped with hemodynamics rooms on both sides of the border that may answer the Spanish-Portuguese border populations’ needs. Besides, while granting valuable information for decision-makers regarding the need to develop new infrastructures to guarantee that even considering cross border cooperation, everyone gets access to a hemodynamics room within the critical intervention period.

Highlights

Providing adequate essential services is an increasingly important issue in livelihoods, sustainability, and public policy [1]
The design of the base cartography, continuing with the determination of the floating catchment areas of the hospitals equipped with some hemodynamic room and continues with the obtaining of the thematic cartography that shows the degree of health coverage for each municipality in two differentiated scenarios and ends with the comparative analysis of the alphanumeric information
Spain and Portugal have developed health policies without consideration of the status in the other neighboring country—as shown by the poor distribution of hospitals in the cross-border area—the territories located near the Portuguese-Spanish borderland

Summary

Introduction

Providing adequate essential services is an increasingly important issue in livelihoods, sustainability, and public policy [1]. Spatial aspects can become a physical barrier that hinders adequate access to health services, depending on the separation distance where the patient needs medical assistance to the nearest hospital where he or she can be assisted [10,11]. For this reason, health service planning must make it accessible and effective for the whole of the served population [12,13,14]. A country’s health care capacity affects others due to the interconnection between economic, social, technological, and political systems [17]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion