Two-step floating catchment area method
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The two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method is a special case of a gravity model of spatial interaction that was developed to measure spatial accessibility to primary care physicians (Luo and Wang 2003a, b). 2SFCA can also be used to measure other accessibility such as accessibility to jobs, to cancer care ficilities, etc. It was inspired by the spatial decomposition idea first proposed by Radke and Mu (2000). 2FSCA not only has most of the advantages of a gravity model, but also intuitive to interpret, as it uses essentially a special form of physician-to-population ratio. It is easy to implement in a GIS environment (Luo and Wang, 2003b; Wang and Luo, 2005; Wang, 2006: 80-95). In essence, the 2SFCA method measures spatial accessibility as a ratio of primary-care physicians to population: step 1), it first assesses “physician availability” at the physicians (supply) location as the ratio of physicians to their surrounding population (i.e., within a threshold travel time from the physicians); step 2, it sums up the ratios (i.e., physician availability derived in the first step) around (i.e., within the same threshold travel time from) each residential (demand) location.
It has been recently enhanced by considering distance decay within catchments (Luo and Qi, 2009) and called enhanced two-step floating catchment area (E2SFCA) method.
See also
References
- Luo, W., Wang, F., 2003a. Spatial accessibility to primary care and physician shortage area designation: a case study in Illinois with GIS approaches. In: Skinner, R., Khan, O. (Eds.), Geographic Information Systems and Health Applications. Idea Group Publishing, Hershey, PA, pp. 260–278.
- Luo, W., Wang, F., 2003b. "Measures of spatial accessibility to health care in a GIS environment: synthesis and a case study in the Chicago region", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 30, 865–884. doi:10.1068/b29120
- Luo, W. and Y. Qi, 2009, “An enhanced two-step floating catchment area (E2SFCA) method for measuring spatial accessibility to primary care physicians", Health & Place, 15, 1100–1107 doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2009.06.002
- Radke, J., Mu, L., 2000. Spatial decomposition, modeling and mapping service regions to predict access to social programs. Geographic Information Sciences 6, 105–112.
- Wang, F., Luo, W., 2005. "Assessing spatial and nonspatial factors for healthcare access: towards an integrated approach to defining health professional shortage areas", Health and Place, 11, 131–146.
- Wang, F. 2006. Quantitative Methods and Applications in GIS. London: CRC Press. ISBN 0849327954