Measuring a Patient's Spatial Accessibility to a Nationwide Healthcare Service: The Example of Thermal Spa Therapies in France for Long Covid-19 Patients

Abstract

Accessibility to healthcare services is a major medical and socio-economic concern. Various measures of spatial accessibility to these services exist (regional availability, gravity model and the 2 Steps Floating Catchment Area method).  However, these are dichotomous measures in which all localities outside the catchment area are assumed to have no access. And yet, for medical or geographical reasons, some healthcare services may be distant from patients because they are located outside a local or regional catchment area. The aim of this article is to present a method for measuring patient accessibility to healthcare services on a national scale. We test this method on the case of thermal spas in France, which have emerged as an interesting option for patients with long COVID-19. To analyze this case, we mobilize the attractiveness model proposed by David Huff.    Access to healthcare requires methods of measuring accessibility that are adapted to each type of territory.There is no single method fully suited to measuring access to healthcare services on a national scale.We mobilize David Huff's attractiveness model to build and test such a method on the case of access to thermal spa therapies for long Covid-19 patients in France.

Note:
Funding Information: This work was supported by to the European Regional Development Fund (European LEADER REACT-EU research program entitled CAUVIM-19).

Declaration of Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Keywords: Access to healthcare, geographic mapping, Huff model, long COVID-19, thermal spa therapy