Comparing alternative approaches to measuring the geographical accessibility of urban health services: Distance types and aggregation-error issues

摘要

BackgroundOver the past two decades, geographical accessibility of urban resources for population living in residential areas has received an increased focus in urban health studies. Operationalising and computing geographical accessibility measures depend on a set of four parameters, namely definition of residential areas, a method of aggregation, a measure of accessibility, and a type of distance. Yet, the choice of these parameters may potentially generate different results leading to significant measurement errors.The aim of this paper is to compare discrepancies in results for geographical accessibility of selected health care services for residential areas (i.e. census tracts) computed using different distance types and aggregation methods.