Spatial Analysis of Healthcare Services in Portugal

Abstract

Providing an equal access to health services, wherever citizens happen to live or work, is paramount to many health systems. As such, it is acknowledged the importance of analysing the spatial distribution of health services and the percentage of population covered by the existing health network for policy-making. Thus, the focus of this paper is to analyse and map the geographic access to primary and secondary healthcare services in Portugal. In order to assess the geographic access, several isochronous with a routing algorithm in PostgreSQL/Postgis were created, which allowed the analysis of different travel time and its evaluation according to both the national guidelines. Findings show that, despite a general high spatial coverage, regional disparities persist, with the Metropolitan Areas of Lisbon and Porto showing the best results.