Quantitative Evaluation of Spatial Accessibility of Various Urban Medical Services Based on Big Data of Outpatient Appointments

Jinling Sui; Guoqin Zhang; Tao Lin; Nicholas A S Hamm; Chunlin Li; Xian Wu; Kaiqun Hu

doi:10.3390/ijerph20065050

Quantitative Evaluation of Spatial Accessibility of Various Urban Medical Services Based on Big Data of Outpatient Appointments

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 Mar 13;20(6):5050. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20065050.

Authors

Jinling Sui^{1

2}, Guoqin Zhang¹, Tao Lin^{1

3}, Nicholas A S Hamm⁴, Chunlin Li⁵, Xian Wu^{1

3}, Kaiqun Hu¹

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China.
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
³ Xiamen Key Laboratory of Smart Management on the Urban Environment, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China.
⁴ School of Geographical Sciences, University of Nottingham, Ningbo 315100, China.
⁵ CAS Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Management, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China.

Abstract

Equity of urban medical services affects human health and well-being in cities and is important in building 'just' cities. We carried out a quantitative analysis of the spatial accessibility of medical services considering the diverse demands of people of different ages, using outpatient appointment big data and refining the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method. We used the traditional 2SFCA method to evaluate the overall spatial accessibility of medical services of 504 communities in Xiamen city, considering the total population and the supply of medical resources. Approximately half the communities had good access to medical services. The communities with high accessibility were mainly on Xiamen Island, and those with low accessibility were further from the central city. The refined 2SFCA method showed a more diverse and complex spatial distribution of accessibility to medical services. Overall, 209 communities had high accessibility to internal medicine services, 133 to surgery services, 50 to gynecology and obstetrics services, and 18 to pediatric services. The traditional method may over-evaluate or under-evaluate the accessibility of different types of medical services for most communities compared with the refined evaluation method. Our study can provide more precise information on urban medical service spatial accessibility to support just city development and design.

Keywords: 2SFCA; Xiamen City; big data; medical service spatial accessibility; residents in different ages; type of medical service.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Big Data*
Catchment Area, Health
Child
Cities
Health Services Accessibility
Humans
Outpatients*

Grants and funding

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 41871167, 42271299), Fujian Provincial Department of Science and Technology Issue (grant No. 2019R1007-1), Ningbo Commonweal Science and Technology Planning Project (grant No. 2021S081) and the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province (grant No. 2022J01511).