Analysis of accessibility to hierarchical healthcare facilities in urban area: A case study in Shanghai

Abstract The accessibility to healthcare facilities is closely linked to people's health and quality of life, which is especially evident in densely populated metropolises, such as Shanghai, China. Access to healthcare facilities is determined by various spatial and nonspatial factors, such as population, transportation modes, travel time, and the reputation of hospitals. In this research, with the consideration of all these factors mentioned above, a new approach based on the two‐step floating catchment area method and multi‐source datasets was proposed to measure the accessibility to these hierarchical healthcare facilities in Shanghai, China, including secondary hospitals and tertiary hospitals. In addition, a web mapping Application Programming Interface (API) was employed in this research to retrieve the traffic cost for different transportation modes and the analytic hierarchy process approach was also employed to help calculate the comprehensive accessibility in Shanghai considering both different types of hospitals and different modes of transportation. The results show that depending on modes of transportation, significant differences can be seen in accessibilities to different types of healthcare facilities. The calculated comprehensive accessibility reflects that the central regions in the research area have higher accessibility compared to the surrounding areas in Shanghai in general and more detailed spatial patterns could also been seen from the accessibility map. The research findings can also be utilized to support the better allocation of healthcare facilities at various levels.