Using Prospective Methods to Identify Fieldwork Locations Favourable to Understanding Divergences in Health Care Accessibility

Central to this article is the issue of choosing sites for where a fieldwork could provide a better understanding of divergences in health care accessibility. Access to health care is critical to good health, but inhabitants may experience barriers to health care limiting their ability to obtain the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inISPRS international journal of geo-information Vol. 10; no. 8; p. 506
Main Authors Rød, Jan Ketil, Eide, Arne H., Halvorsen, Thomas, Munthali, Alister
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.08.2021
Subjects
Access
Accessibility
Archaeology
Digital Elevation Models
Digital mapping
Field study
Fieldwork
Geographic information systems
Health care
Health care access
Health facilities
Health services
Hiking
Historic buildings & sites
Households
Identification methods
Impedance
Inhabitants
Land cover
Locations (working)
Low income areas
Malawi
Meandering
path distance
Physicians
Population
prospecting
Statistical methods
Surveying
Tobler’s hiking function
Walking
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Summary:Central to this article is the issue of choosing sites for where a fieldwork could provide a better understanding of divergences in health care accessibility. Access to health care is critical to good health, but inhabitants may experience barriers to health care limiting their ability to obtain the care they need. Most inhabitants of low-income countries need to walk long distances along meandering paths to get to health care services. Individuals in Malawi responded to a survey with a battery of questions on perceived difficulties in accessing health care services. Using both vertical and horizontal impedance, we modelled walking time between household locations for the individuals in our sample and the health care centres they were using. The digital elevation model and Tobler’s hiking function were used to represent vertical impedance, while OpenStreetMap integrated with land cover map were used to represent horizontal impedance. Combining measures of walking time and perceived accessibility in Malawi, we used spatial statistics and found spatial clusters with substantial discrepancies in health care accessibility, which represented fieldwork locations favourable for providing a better understanding of barriers to health access.
ISSN:2220-9964
2220-9964
DOI:10.3390/ijgi10080506