title: Investigating impacts of positional error on potential health care accessibility.
abstract: Accessibility to health services at the local or community level is an effective approach to measuring health care delivery in various constituencies in Canada and the United States. GIS and spatial methods play an important role in measuring potential access to health services. The Three-Step Floating Catchment Area (3SFCA) method is a GIS based procedure developed to calculate potential (spatial) accessibility as a ratio of primary health care (PHC) providers to the surrounding population in urban settings. This method uses PHC provider locations in textual/address format supplied by local, regional, or national health authorities. An automated geocoding procedure is normally used to convert such addresses to a pair of geographic coordinates. The accuracy of geocoding depends on the type of reference data and the amount of value-added effort applied. This research investigates the success and accuracy of six geocoding methods as well as how geocoding error affects the 3SFCA method. ArcGIS software is used for geocoding and spatial accessibility estimation. Results will focus on two implications of geocoding: (1) the success and accuracy of different automated and value-added geocoding; and (2) the implications of these geocoding methods for GIS-based methods that generalise results based on location data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography and Planning, University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Canada. smb332@campus.usask.ca
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bell
authors.forename: Kathi
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wilson
authors.forename: Tayyab Ikram
authors.initials: TI
authors.lastname: Shah
authors.forename: Sarina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gersher
authors.forename: Tina
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Elliott
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D015982:Bias; D002170:Canada; D003625:Data Collection / Q000379:methods*; D040362:Geographic Information Systems; D062305:Geographic Mapping; D006297:Health Services Accessibility / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D012107:Research Design; D019037:Urban Health Services / Q000600:supply & distribution*