Measuring Geographical Accessibility to Healthcare Facilities in Peri-Urban Dwellers of Mbeya City, Tanzania

Abstract

The spatial arrangement of Healthcare Facilities implies the organization of the facilities across the geographical space. This concerned with the response to series of locational factors include: availability of approachable roads, easy access to facility from other nearby settlement, mode of transport or impediments like forest, water bodies, rough terrain etc. Healthcare services are powerfully subjective to the type and quality of services available in the native area and the time, distance, cost and easy of travelling or walking to reach those services. This paper highlights a method for approximating the geographical accessibility to Healthcare Facilities in peri-urban dwellers in Mbeya City, Tanzania. ArcGIS Network Analyst was used to build a road network dataset and measure the shortest network distance and shortest travel time to closest Healthcare via road network. The analysis was applied to approximately 2,143 households in Mbeya City peri-urban allowing geographical access to be interconnected to native dwellers. The population was not distributed evenly across the subwards, the subwards centroids were considered as a demand points and the Healthcare Facilities were considered as supply points. The study concludes that, there is poor spatial accessibility to Health Facilities and wellbeing among resident in the peri-urban area, whereby among the six studied wards, only 3 wards, Iziwa, Itagano and Mwasenkwa had only one public dispensary, and there is one doctor, two nurses and one midwife from the public dispensary but lack some diagnostic equipment, drugs and an insufficient number of skilled staff of which all have an effect on utilization and demand for Healthcare.