Quantification of Ideal Spatial Accessibility Using Three Step Floating Catchment Area Method

Community Health Care (CHC) units are considered to be the backbone of rural health care in developing countries. Inadequate access and lack of infrastructure and medicines at CHC are of growing concerns especially for people living in rural and remote areas. Thus there is a need to identify health care shortage areas and also to develop a proper planning strategy to encounter the deficits in accessing CHC. For finding health care lacking areas, two techniques named Two step Floating Catchment area method (2SFCA) and Enhanced Two step Floating Catchment area method (E2SFCA) have been widely used over a decade. Both these methods consider people as choice users which contributes for the overestimation of accessibility. In this study, a new methodology has been developed to find accessibility to health care by limiting the shortcoming of the previous methods. Defining ideal accessibility is also a major issue as it varies with respect to placement and distribution of habitations in a region. Moreover far less research has been carried out in establishing an ideal accessibility,as it requires ideal distribution and ideal spatial location of CHCs. Thus in this study a HSA (Hierarchical strategic allocation) planning has been proposed to determine an ideal spatial accessibility of a habitation. Health care resource allocation in majority of the developing countries is governed either by historical precedent or political patronage which is responsible for the disparities in service levels among the habitations. Therefore in this study a Hierarchical factor (H-factor) method has been proposed to draw an optimal solution. Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan, India is considered as a case study to analyze and validate the results. The proposed methodology is quite robust and it is observed that with the optimal distribution of existing resources, the disparities in spatial accessibility is reduced by 50.52%. Furthermore the calculated ideal spatial accessibility helps in the assessment of planning strategies.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB30 Standing Committee on Transportation Network Modeling.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Puppala, Harish
  • Kanuganti, Shalini
  • Sarkar, Ashoke Kumar
  • Singh, Ajit Pratap
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 15p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Accessibility; Catchment areas; Developing countries; Health care; Rural areas
• Geographic Terms: Rajasthan (India)
• Subject Areas: Planning and Forecasting; Security and Emergencies; Transportation (General);

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01629495
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-03205
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 20 2017 9:23AM