Abstract
The accessibility and distribution of healthcare facilities have great significance not only for protecting basic human rights to healthcare but also for maintaining the social stability. This study aimed to describe the accessibility of urban and rural residents of Ardabil county to hospitals and location-allocation for a new public hospital in 2020. This study focused on Ardabil county of Iran as an empirical case and acquired travel time to eight public and private hospitals by riding and walking through the network analysis of ArcGIS version 10.3. To demonstrate the location-allocation of a new public hospital, we used the weighted overlay toolset to combine population density, access to public hospital based on the traveling time and distance, cold spot of population count in each access time and distance to the public hospitals, street type, and traffic speed maps. The maximum travel time by using a car was 59 min and mean time to access public, private, social security, psychiatry, children, and all hospitals were 7:30, 7:40, 6:52, 8, 9:10, and 5:24 min, respectively. Also, the meantime of access to public hospitals after adding a new hospital decreased from 7:30 to 5:40 min. According to the results, all residents of Ardabil county have appropriate spatial access to hospitals using cars. Although in walking mode, the access of many residents, especially rural populations, was not desirable. We suggested using GIS capabilities to distribute hospitals fairly and location-allocation for new hospitals establishment to provide all criteria of an accessible hospital.
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The authors would like to thank the deputy of research at Ardabil University of Medical Sciences.
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The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest in this study.
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This study was supported financially by the Ardabil University of Medical Sciences (Grant number 9304).
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This study was approved by the Ardabil University of Medical Sciences.
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Barzegari, S., Arpaci, I., Mahmoudvand, Z. (2022). Spatial Accessibility to Hospitals Based on GIS: An Empirical Study in Ardabil. In: Al-Emran, M., Shaalan, K. (eds) Recent Innovations in Artificial Intelligence and Smart Applications. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 1061. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14748-7_20
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