Kierunki zmian w dostępności ochrony zdrowia w województwie łódzkim u progu XXI w.

Equality in the access to health service is one of major human rights, and providing it is the basic aim of every health care system. Changes which are taking place in Poland - migration processes, the aging society with simultaneous strong demographic differentiation in regional cross-section, restructuring of medical facilities etc., cause changes in accessibility to medical facilities. For the last twenty years the average life span of the Lodz voivodeship inhabitants has been on the lowest level in Poland. The research objective of this paper is to find an answer to the question whether the relatively short life span of Lodz voivodeship inhabitants is influenced by limited access to medical infrastructure. The article presents the essence of the problem of accessibility to health protection and indicates the measures of its assessment: subjective - the assessment of accessibility carried out by patients based on the survey (based on social diagnosis) and objective – including the number of hospitals and hospital beds per 10 000 inhabitants, the number of primary health care clinics and dental clinics per 10 000 inhabitants, advice provided per capita and the number of people per public pharmacy (based on Central Statistical Office data and Health Care Clinics registers). The accessibility to medical infrastructure analysis in the Lodz voivodeship has been presented against the background of Poland. The carried out analysis does not enable a positive verification of the thesis that the relatively short life span of Lodz voivodeship inhabitants is af- fected by limited access to health care infrastructure