Assessment of spatial accessibility to health care facilities in Tanzania: a case of Wanging’ombe District in Njombe Region

Abstract

Access to health care facilities plays an important role in overall health system and has a direct impact on the burden of diseases that affect many countries. It varies across space due to uneven distribution of health care providers and consumers and among the population group due to their different socio-economic and demographic characteristics. In recent years there has been an increase in the number of health care facilities in Tanzania so as to improve the access to health care. However, there are still geographic inequalities in access to health care facilities which are not well known in most of the districts. This paper uses GIS tools in improved gravity-based accessibility measure to compute the potential spatial accessibility scores. The computed potential spatial accessibility scores were interpolated and presented against the shapefile of Wanging‟ombe villages to examine their variation. The results show that potential spatial accessibility scores varies from 2.24 to 12.84 with the mean value of 3.8 and standard deviation of 0.71. The variation exists within and across the villages. The value of potential spatial accessibility scores are influenced by service capacity of health care facility, population demand and travel distance. Such results can be useful to health planners and health investors as they can help them identify potential areas with poor access to health care facilities.

Keywords: spatial accessibility, health care facilities, geographical information systems