Measuring geographical accessibility to primary health centers in Chamarajanagara district

The spatial pattern of health care facilities is concerned with the arrangement of the facilities across a geographical space. This could be in response to series of locational factors such as: easy access to facility from other nearby settlement, availability of approachable roads, mode of transport or impediment like water bodies, forests, rugged terrain and others. Health care decisions are strongly influenced by the type and quality of services available in the local area and the distance, time, cost, and ease of traveling to reach those services. This paper demonstrates a method for estimating the geographical accessibility to PHC's. Network analysis in GIS, is used to determine the travel distance and travel time to closest healthcare via road network. This analysis is applied to approximately 430 villages in Chamarajanagara district allowing geographical access to be linked to local populations. The population is not distributed uniform across villages, the village centroids were considered as a demand points, and the PHC facilities were considered as supply points. The study concludes that Chamarajanagara and Gundlupete taluks are having good number of health centers to serve the local people, while as Yelanduru and Kollegala taluks are serving more people with relatively less number of health centers