Health Accessibility analysis in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic

Keywords: health geography, accessibility analysis
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 29

Abstract

Health accessibility analysis has been widely used in geography and public health fields to measure the ease with which people access health care facilities. It provides a fast and intuitive means to identify under-served areas to certain resources. Recent years have seen various variants of health accessibility analysis methods and numerous successful applications. However, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, new challenges have emerged. The critical new issues include the absence of numerators (i.e., capacity), the lack of consideration of socio-demographic composition, and how those issues intertwine with the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). Different solutions were proposed to overcome those issues. Systematic comparisons under different scales were made to assess the variances between solutions and inconsistencies across scales. This preliminary result calls for attention to the use of health accessibility analysis in certain scenarios.