Seniors accessibility to primary health care centers using the public transport system in Uppsala

Abstract: Since many seniors are non-car holders, they are often dependent of the public transport system in reaching vital services, such as primary health care centers. Having spatial accessibility to primary health care centers can be of importance not only for preventing fatal outcomes of chronic diseases, but also for the utilization of these services. The aim of this study is to analyze how accessible primary health care centers are for people from the age of 65 and older in Uppsala by analyzing the public transport system. Statistical data on populations was collected, such as positions of bus stops and primary health care centers. GIS was used as a tool in order to analyze and visualize the data with maps. Accessibility was implemented through the cumulative opportunities measure with distance as impedance to get the total number of primary health care centers reached within each residential area. The measure of centrality was based on the assumption of Uppsala being a monocentric city where the central point was set at the most central clinic in the city. A regression analysis was conducted in order to see if closeness to a public health care facility, wealth, disposable income and centrality had an impact on accessibility and if there were any differences between the seniors and the general population in accessibility. The results showed that seniors were having better access to primary health care centers than the total population. The seniors who were living within a walking distance to a primary health care center had better accessibility, but fewer primary health care centers to choose from. Furthermore, both rich and poor individuals had an increase in accessibility suggesting that poor seniors do not have lower accessibility. Residential areas with a higher and lower disposable income had slightly lower accessibility. At last, the centrality measure showed a similar result, where central and peripheral areas had lower accessibility but areas in between had higher accessibility, which stands in contrast with the conducted maps, indicating that Uppsala might be a polycentric and not a monocentric city.