Identifying Aging Villages with Primary Care Shortages: A Geographic Information System Approach

Abstract

This study aims to identify villages with low or no public medical resources. Two counties in Taiwan— Chiayi and Yunlin—were selected for this purpose because they have the highest aging ratio in Taiwan, which could potentially lead to high demands for primary care clinics. The enhanced two-step floating catchment area method was used to calculate the potential spatial accessibility of each village. Spatial autocorrelation analysis was further used to locate spatial clusters of villages with low clinic accessibility. This study found that 45.4% of the population living in the villages in Chiayi and Yunlin had insufficient medical resources while 0.74% (8,799 people) had no access to primary care clinics at all. The study recommends that health authorities shift public medical resources from oversupplied areas (i.e., southwestern Chiayi) to shortage areas (i.e., eastern Chiayi and western Yunlin) to increase their medical resources.