Potential Accessibility To Health Care: A Case Study

Accessibility to health care has received much attention in the literature over recent years. According to Luo and Wang (2003), access to health care can be looked at from two broad viewpoints: potential versus revealed, and spatial versus aspatial. Potential access is the ability to enter the healthcare system, but does not guarantee service usage. Revealed access on the other hand, looks at the utilization of health care services (Khan, 1992; Phillips & Joseph, 1984). A progression from potential access to revealed access can be affected by a number of factors (Guagliardo, 2004). These factors include: affordability, acceptability, accommodation, availability, and accessibility. The first three are aspatial and the last two are spatial (Guagliardo, 2004). Spatial accessibility looks at factors such as geographical location, transportation and distance to facilities, the time required to reach facilities and how they influence the supply and demand of healthcare (Wang, 2015). For example, Horner & Mascarenhas (2007) looked at how the geographical location of dental facilities influence accessibility. Similarly, Kim Kimminau and Anthony Wellever (2011), , were able to identify areas lacking dental services in Kansas using mapping …show more content…
For example, Peng (1997) used a FCA method to assess jobs-housing ratios and urban commuting patterns in Portland, Oregon. Similarly, Wang (2000) used a FCA to explain commuting variation for census geographies. According to Luo and Wang (2003), the former version of the FCA method had two weaknesses. First, it assumes that only service areas within the catchment are available to the residents and that all areas outside the catchment do not have access to the service. Second, the availability of a service in a catchment does not guarantee access from each demand