Abstract
Abstract. The aim of this paper is to measure the spatial accessibility to public health care facilities in Greece. We look at population groups disaggregated by age and socioeconomic characteristics. The purpose of the analysis is to identify potential spatial inequalities in the accessibility to public hospitals among population groups or service areas. The data refer to the accessibility of all residents to public hospitals in Greece. The spatial datasets include the location of settlements (communities), the administrative boundaries of municipalities and the location of public hospitals. The methodology stems from spatial analysis theory (gravity models), economics theory (inequalities) and geocomputation practice (GIS and programming). Several accessibility measures have been calculated using the newly developed R package SpatialAcc, which is available in CRAN. The results are interesting and tend to show an urban-rural and social class divide: younger, working age population as well as people with the highest educational attainment have better accessibility to public hospitals compared to older or low educated residents. This finding has serious policy making implications and should be taken into account in the future spatial (re)organisation of hospitals in Greece.
Highlights
1.1 The importance of spatial accessibilityDespite the development of the internet that reduced a certain number of trips to shops and service providers, the spatial accessibility to health services remains vital
This paper aims to look at inequalities in spatial accessibility to public hospitals in Greece while presenting the R package SpatialAcc (Kalogirou, 2017a) that has been developed to assist this analysis
The most commonly used types of spatial accessibility measures refer to the distance and/or travel time to the nearest health service; the population-to-provider ratios (PPR); the gravity theory based accessibility; the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA); and kernel density estimation (KDE) (Neutens, 2015)
Summary
Despite the development of the internet that reduced a certain number of trips to shops and service providers (including public administration), the spatial accessibility to health services remains vital. This is the case for regular as well as emergency visits to doctors, especially large health facilities such as hospitals. The recent literature (Kalogirou and Mostratos, 2004; Kalogirou, 2017b; Santana, 2000; Christie and Fone, 2003), suggests that such inequalities exist and refer to an urban-rural divide as well as to an age and a social class divide It appears that hospitals are more accessible for children and younger people compared to older people. These people have to travel long distances to receive the necessary care
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