title: A brief report on Primary Care Service Area catchment geographies in New South Wales Australia.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  To develop a method to use survey data to establish catchment areas of primary care or Primary Care Service Areas. Primary Care Service Areas are small areas, the majority of patients resident in which obtain their primary care services from within the geography.
  
  
  METHODS
  The data are from a large health survey (n =267,153, year 2006-2009) linked to General Practitioner service use data (year 2002-2010) from New South Wales, Australia. Our methods broadly follow those used previously by researchers in the United States of America and Switzerland, with significant modifications to improve robustness. This algorithm allocates post code areas to Primary Care Service Areas that receive the plurality of patient visits from the post code area.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Consistent with international findings the median Localization Index or the median percentage of patients that obtain their primary care from within a Primary Care Service Area is 55% with localization increasing with rurality.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  With the additional methodological refinements in this study, Australian Primary Care Service Areas have great potential to be of value to policymakers and researchers.
authors.affiliation: Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute, Australian National University, Building 63 Cnr Mills and Eggleston Rds, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. soumyamazumdar@yahoo.com.
authors.forename: Soumya
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Mazumdar
authors.forename: Xiaoqi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Konings
authors.forename: Ian
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: McRae
authors.forename: Federico
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Girosi
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002391:Catchment Area, Health; D005260:Female; D006306:Health Surveys / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009517:New South Wales / Q000453:epidemiology; D011320:Primary Health Care / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D058028:Research Report / Q000639:trends