Improving the measurement of the Korean emergency medical system's spatial accessibility

Abstract

Since the level of the delivery of healthcare differs from place to place in each country, researches have been conducted to establish the measurement which can comprehensively assess it. As a result of those endeavours, healthcare spatial accessibility has been used a lot to evaluate the availability of and the geographical accessibility to healthcare resource at each region. However, most researchers have applied previous works to other situations uncritically or added few modifications without verification, because it is hard to obtain patients' data needed to substantiate their suggestions. In this paper, I analyzed drawbacks of the existing measurements and proposed the new one including three improvements. First, relative travel time weights are defined to represent the relative value of healthcare facilities which a patient would perceive at each region. Second, absolute travel time weights are established to describe the mobile convenience of patients in common. Lastly, I corrected the factor in reflecting competition between patients since it has been applied in a wrong way. Besides, all improvements were verified or created from utilization data on the Korean emergency medical system. Consequently, I evaluated spatial accessibility of the Korean emergency medical system by the improved metric and defined deprivation regions.