Identifying equality and accessibility to health centers via Spatial Information Science

Abstract

Citizens living in mega cities need easy and fast access to health services and hospitals. In situations such as natural disasters or pandemics, it is critical to reaching such services rapidly to prevent losses and reduce health damages. Furthermore, ensuring equality in accessibility for such services is a vital responsibility for the governments. Quantifying accessibility and serving equality among the population is a significant challenge, where Geographical Information Systems (GIS) environment could provide solutions. In this paper, adequacy of the existing health services for the European side of Istanbul is analyzed spatially and quantitatively via open data sources. Then, the proportion of both rural and urban population that has access to the health services within walking distance is determined. Within this context, Urban and Rural Health Accessibility Indexes are proposed to generalize developed concepts. According to the achieved results, ~93% of the total population has access to a health service. Furthermore, the achieved results also represent the spatial distribution of the citizens having access to health services which is not previously provided via former studies in the region. The proposed concept is applicable for every city either in Turkey or in the world to help decision-makers prioritizing of their actions.