scholarly journals Spatial Accessibility of Primary Health Care in Rural Areas in Poland

Author(s):  
Łukasz Lechowski ◽  
Angelika Jasion

The aim of the study was to assess the spatial accessibility of basic and universal healthcare (understood as primary healthcare (PHC) facilities) in rural statistical localities in Poland. Data from the National Health Fund, Central Statistical Office, National Register of Geographic Names and OpenStreetMap were used in the research. The research was carried out on the basis of modelled distance from the rural statistical localities to the nearest PHC facility. The methods used included network analysis, characteristics of normal point distribution, Theil index, and spatial autocorrelation. Areas where the greatest shortages of access to PHC facilities occurred were indicated on the basis of the analysis of their clustering density. The average distance from rural statistical localities in Poland to PHC facilities is about 5 km. Slightly more than 70% of the distance values are within one standard deviation of the mean. Better access to the examined healthcare facilities is available in the southern and central parts of Poland, while northern and eastern Poland, as well as the border areas, suffer from lower accessibility. Poor access to PHC occurs first of all at the border of Greater Poland Voivodeship with the Kuyavian–Pomeranian Voivodeship, on the border of the Lodz Voivodeship, in Masovian and Swietokrzyskie Voivodeship, and in the ring surrounding Warsaw, as well as in the Pomeranian Voivodeship. The research findings can be used to develop strategies to improve the accessibility of primary care facilities in rural areas.

Open Medicine ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 528-538
Author(s):  
Piotr Tyszko ◽  
Waldemar Wierzba ◽  
Krzysztof Kanecki ◽  
Anna Ziółkowska

AbstractPoland, like other countries with previously dominant state healthcare systems, has introduced ownership transformation in the healthcare structure. These changes, however, are being accomplished without a clearly defined state policy in this area. The aim of the present study was to assess the course and effects of ownership transformation in outpatient healthcare and hospitals. Data were collected from publications of the Central Statistical Office, which provided information on the numbers of outpatient healthcare institutions, medical practices, general hospitals, and services they provided. The healthcare ownership transformation has divided the medical services market into public and nonpublic providers. In addition, privatization of outpatient healthcare facilities precedes privatization of hospitals, outpatient institutions providing primary healthcare were privatized first; the subsequent stage included those providing specialized services, at first privatization of ambulatory medical infrastructure preceded privatization of services in urban areas, whereas in rural areas, privatization of services preceded structural privatization, privatization provides favorable conditions to improve territorial availability of outpatient healthcare in urban areas, medical practices, although numerous, are of little importance in providing services, the hospital ownership transformation is at its initial stage, and structural ownership transformation in the Polish healthcare system is subject to market rules.


2021 ◽  
Vol 301 ◽  
pp. 02004
Author(s):  
Inna Čábelková ◽  
Zhanna Gardanova ◽  
Eduard Neimatov ◽  
Vladimir Esaulov

This research concentrates on the spatial accessibility assessment to healthcare facilities. Specifically, in doing so it compares the situation in urban and rural areas. In many countries, health inequalities continue to be a major public health challenge. Furthermore, there is also urbanization that occurs when people move from rural areas to urban areas. It leads to an increase in urban population and the extent of urban areas. Driven by population growth, many cities in low and middle-income countries are growing at record rates which puts large pressure on the healthcare system and facilities. Our research demonstrates that due to many political, economic, social and cultural factors, the current inequalities in health care between regions, urban and rural areas and different age and income groups are increasing. Thence, there is a pressing need for the improvement of the healthcare in the lagged regions and areas using such means as the advanced technologies, analysis of data, as well as targeted funding and assistance to those who need it the most.


2021 ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Muhamad Iqbal Januadi Putra ◽  
Nabila Dety Novia Utami

The presence of healthcare facilities is quite essential to provide good healthcare services in a particular area, however, the existence of healthcare facilities is not evenly distributed in Cianjur Regency. This condition leads to the disparities of healthcare facilities across the Cianjur Regency. In this paper, we aim to measure and map the spatial disparities of healthcare facilities using a Two-Step Floating Catchment Analysis (2SFCA). This method can calculate the magnitude of spatial accessibility for healthcare facilities by formulating the travel time threshold and the quality of healthcare facilities across the study area. This research shows the result that the spatial accessibility of healthcare facilities in the Cianjur Regency is not evenly distributed across the districts. The spatial accessibility value resulted from 2SFCA is ranging from 0- 3.97. A low value indicates low spatial accessibility, while a higher value shows good accessibility. The majority of districts in the Cianjur Regency have the spatial accessibility value 0-0.5 (86%). Meanwhile, only a few have the higher value; value 0.5-0.99 as much as 6.6%, 0.99-1.49 as 3.3%, and 3.48-3.97 has a percentage of 3.3%. Also, this analysis results in the cluster of good spatial accessibility in healthcare facilities, namely the Pagelaran District and Cipanas District. Interestingly, the downtown of Cianjur Regency has lower spatial accessibility compared to both areas.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 252-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Harris

Explanations for the expansion of the welfare state have frequently centered on the importance of left-wing political parties and labor unions. Scholars have even pointed to the rare but growing significance of social democracy in the industrializing world. Yet, in the field of healthcare, labor unions frequently oppose sweeping universalistic reforms that threaten to erode members’ existing benefits, and those most in need of healthcare in rural areas and the informal sector are often the least organized politically. In the absence of mass demands, who then is responsible for universal healthcare programs in the industrializing world, and by what means do they successfully advocate for far-reaching reforms? This article explores the role that “professional movements” played in expanding access to healthcare in an industrializing nation that was engaged in processes of democratization. Mass movements are typically composed of lay people; by contrast, professional movements are made up of elites from esteemed professions who command knowledge, networks, and access to state resources that set them apart from ordinary citizens. The account illustrates how and why professional movements are able to play such a powerful role in health policymaking in the industrializing world, points to the need for more research on professional movements in other cases and policy domains, and discusses their relevance to social change in the industrializing world.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Daoud ◽  
Anne-Sophie Hamy-Petit ◽  
Elise Dumas ◽  
Lidia Delrieu ◽  
Beatriz Grandal Rejo ◽  
...  

Background: Cancer caused nearly 10 million deaths in 2020. While most of the ongoing research focuses on finding new treatments, accessibility to oncology care receives less attention. However, studies showed that access to health services plays a key role in cancer survival. Spatial accessibility methods have been successfully applied to measure accessibility to primary care. Yet, little research focused on oncology care specifically. Methods: We focused on care centers with medicine, surgery, or obstetric activity in metropolitan France. We ran a clustering algorithm to automatically label the hospitals in terms of oncology specialization. Then, we computed an accessibility score to these hospitals for every municipality in metropolitan France. Finally, we proposed an optimization algorithm to increase the oncology accessibility by identifying care centers to grow. Results: We labelled 1,662 care centers into 8 clusters. Half of them were eligible for oncology care and 118 centers were identified as experts. We computed the oncology accessibility score for 34,877 municipalities in metropolitan France. Half of the population lived in the top 20% accessibility areas, and 6.3% in the bottom 20% zones. Accessibility was higher near dense cities, where the experts care centers were located. By combining the care centers clusters and the accessibility distributions, our optimization algorithm could identify hospitals to grow, to reduce accessibility disparities. Conclusion: Most of the lowest accessibility zones were sparsely populated rural areas, with no oncology specialized care centers nearby. While such areas were hard to improve, accessibility in suburban areas with intermediate level care centers could be addressed more easily. This accessibility score was deliberately non-specific to cancer type nor to the kind of stays, but it could be adapted to more specific scenarios. We packaged our method into a web application allowing the users to run the algorithms with various parameters and visualize the results


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Dolata ◽  
Magdalena Jaworska ◽  
Magdalena Jaworska

The purpose of this paper is to assess the leveland spatial differentiation of selected environmental governanceparameters in the context of implementing the sustainabledevelopment concept in rural areas of the Wielkopolskievoivodeship districts in 2005 and 2015. The research procedurewas made up of three steps: review of the relevant literatureand selection of indicators to describe the environmentalgovernance topics; analyzing the changes in, and spatial differentiationof, specific environmental governance components;and ranking the districts. The basic source of data wasthe online database delivered by the Central Statistical Officein Warsaw, the Local Data Bank. As shown by the results,there is considerable spatial differentiation of specific environmentalgovernance components; however, when analyzedglobally, environmental governance proves to be a relativelynon-diversified process. In 2015, the highest sustainabilitylevels were recorded in rural areas of the following districts:Złotów, Kępno and Jarocin. In turn, the lowest levels werefound in Września, Wągrowiec and Śrem districts.


Author(s):  
Bushra Hamid ◽  
N. Z. Jhanjhi ◽  
Mamoona Humayun ◽  
Farkhanda Qamar ◽  
Vasaki Ponnusamy

Providing affordable and quality healthcare is the most burning demand for humanity. It is a fact that more or less half of the world's population resides in rural areas, and a majority of these people are left without the most basic amenities, such as healthcare and education. It is considered difficult to open and manage healthcare facilities in any community using traditional healthcare models for the states with limited resources particularly for developing countries. One of the most popular substitute tools is telemedicine to improve healthcare for underprivileged groups. In telemedicine, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are employed to ensure healthcare at a distance. On the other hand, one of the main problems in developing countries is the quality and cost of healthcare. In health research, telemedicine has become a new hope for eliminating bottlenecks. In this study, the authors have examined what challenges and issues developing countries are facing in implementation of telemedicine; particularly, they examine Pakistan as a case.


Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 523
Author(s):  
Andrzej Rosner ◽  
Monika Wesołowska

Since the Second World War, Poland has been undergoing an intensive process of transformation of the economic structure of rural areas, manifested, among other things, in the change in the occupational make-up of its inhabitants. The development of non-agricultural methods of management in rural areas has led to the emergence of multifunctional rural areas, where the role of agriculture as a source of income for the inhabitants is decreasing. There is a process of deagrarianisation of the economic structure, which has been indicated by many researchers as an unavoidable process, connected with the changes taking place in rural areas. One of the effects of this process are changes in rural settlement patterns. The aim of this article is to present the spatial effects of the deagrarianisation process in the Polish countryside, expressed in the changes in the rural settlement network. The authors used the statistical database of the Central Statistical Office (over 41 thousand records) to draw up the classification of rural areas by the nature of changes in population numbers in the period 1950–2011, which was compared with the research carried out as part of the Monitoring of Rural Development in Poland. The study confirmed that the factor behind the evolution of the rural settlement network is the process of decreasing agricultural demand for labour. As a consequence, there is a polarisation of localities into multifunctional rural localities, mainly headquarter villages and local government offices, and those with a predominantly agricultural function. On a supra-local scale, a process of polarisation of rural areas between a growing suburban population and a reducing peripheral location around large and medium-sized towns has been observed.


Author(s):  
Andrew Ross ◽  
Gavin MacGregor ◽  
Laura Campbell

Introduction: Staffing of rural and remote facilities is a challenge throughout the world. Umthombo Youth Development Foundation (UYDF) has been running a rurally based scholarship scheme since 1999.The aim of this review is to present data on the number of students selected, their progress, graduation and work placement from inception of the scheme until 2013.Methods: Data were extracted from the UYDF data base using a data collection template to ensure all important information was captured.Results: Since 1999, 430 rural students across 15 health disciplines have been supported by UYDF. The annual pass rate has been greater than 89%, and less than 10% of students have been excluded from university. All graduates have spent time working in rural areas (excluding the 32 currently doing internships) and 72% (52/73) of those with no work-back obligation continue to work in rural areas.Discussion and conclusion: The UYDF model is built around local selection, compulsory academic and peer mentoring and social support, comprehensive financial support and experiential holiday work. The results are encouraging and highlight the fact that rural students can succeed at university and will come back and work in rural areas. With 46% of the South African population situated rurally, greater thought and effort must be put into the recruitment and training of rural scholars as a possible solution to the staffing of rural healthcare facilities. The UYDF provides a model which could be replicated in other parts of South Africa.


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