Modelling geographic accessibility to Primary Health Care Facilities: combining open data and geospatial analysis

ABSTRACT

Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all ages is the 3rd Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). Inequality in access to health care remains one of the primary challenges in achieving the goal. With the ever-increasing expansion of urban areas and population growth, there is a need to regularly examine the pattern of accessibility of basic amenities across regions, States and urban areas. This study examined geographic access to Primary Health Care Facilities (PHCF) in Nigeria using the combination of open data and geospatial analysis techniques. Thus, showcasing an approach can be replicated across different regions in Sub-Saharan Africa due to issues of information gap. Data on elevation, location of health care facilities, population and network data were utilised. The result shows that PHCF aggregate at certain locations, e.g. major urban agglomerations, and transit route leading to these places. High concentrations are found in the capital city. The average travel time to the nearest PHCF is about 14 min (Standard Deviation ±13.30 min) while the maximum is about 2 hours. Pockets of low accessibility areas exist across the Akwa Ibom State in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. There is an indication that most places have good geographic access. Across the 1787 settlements identified in our dataset, 98.3% are with good access (<30 min), 27 settlements are located in the poor access class (31–60 min), while two settlements are within the very poor access class (>60 min). Geographic access is not the main limiting factor to health care access in the region. Therefore, computation of access to health care should take into consideration other dimensions of accessibility, to create a robust measure which will support effective and efficient health care planning and delivery.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatial accessibility
• geographic accessibility
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)
• Primary Health Care Facilities (PHCF)
• Niger Delta
• geocomputation

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olanrewaju Lawal

Olanrewaju Lawal is a senior lecturer at the University of Port Harcourt. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society His works have leveraged the development in GIS, remote sensing, information and communication technology in addressing various issues in relation to sustainability, disaster risk management and risk reduction. Current research interests include application of geocomputation, modelling, geospatial intelligence, geosocial analysis for addressing social, economic and environmental issues.

Felix E. Anyiam

Felix E. Anyiam is a trained Public Health Researcher, Research Data Management Expert and Biostatistician; and presently employed as the Research Officer and Data Analyst (Scientist) for the Centre for Health and Development (CHD), University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, a Centre that evolved from over 10 years of collaboration between faculty members from the University of Port Harcourt and the University of Toronto, Canada. The aim of the CHD is to develop human and organizational capacity for health-related research and quality health care provision in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, built on sustainable local structure, and international collaborations.