Abstract
BackgroundShenzhen has rapidly grown into a megacity in the recent decades. It is a challenging task for the Shenzhen government to provide sufficient healthcare services. The spatial configuration of healthcare services can influence the convenience for the consumers to obtain healthcare services. Spatial accessibility has been widely adopted as a scientific measurement for evaluating the rationality of the spatial configuration of healthcare services.MethodsThe multi-modal two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method is an important advance in the field of healthcare accessibility modelling, which enables the simultaneous assessment of spatial accessibility via multiple transport modes. This study further develops the multi-modal 2SFCA method by introducing online map APIs to improve the estimation of travel time by public transit or by car respectively.ResultsAs the results show, the distribution of healthcare accessibility by multi-modal 2SFCA shows significant spatial disparity. Moreover, by dividing the multi-modal accessibility into car-mode and transit-mode accessibility, this study discovers that the transit-mode subgroup is disadvantaged in the competition for healthcare services with the car-mode subgroup. The disparity in transit-mode accessibility is the main reason of the uneven pattern of healthcare accessibility in Shenzhen.ConclusionsThe findings suggest improving the public transit conditions for accessing healthcare services to reduce the disparity of healthcare accessibility. More healthcare services should be allocated in the eastern and western Shenzhen, especially sub-districts in Dapeng District and western Bao’an District. As these findings cannot be drawn by the traditional single-modal 2SFCA method, the advantage of the multi-modal 2SFCA method is significant to both healthcare studies and healthcare system planning.
Highlights
Shenzhen has rapidly grown into a megacity in the recent decades
It is a challenging task for the Shenzhen government to provide sufficient healthcare services for such an enormous population
On everage, when dividing multi-modal accessibility into car-mode and transit-mode subgroups, the car-mode accessibility is 2.47 times of the transit-mode accessibility. This indicates that the transit-mode subgroup is disadvantaged in the competition for healthcare services with the car-mode subgroup, for an obvious reason that the travel time by public transit is usually larger than the travel time by car
Summary
Shenzhen has rapidly grown into a megacity in the recent decades It is a challenging task for the Shenzhen government to provide sufficient healthcare services. Spatial accessibility has been widely adopted as a scientific measurement for evaluating the rationality of the spatial configuration of healthcare services. As one of the special economic zones in China, Shenzhen has rapidly grown into a megacity with more than 10 million population in the recent decades As a result, it is a challenging task for the Shenzhen government to provide sufficient healthcare services for such an enormous population. Spatial accessibility has been widely adopted as a scientific measurement for the opportunities of obtaining services and the geographic disparity of such opportunities, which can be used to quantitatively assess the spatial configuration of healthcare services [1, 4]
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