Assessment of the spatial accessibility to health professionals at French census block level

Background The evaluation of geographical healthcare accessibility in residential areas provides crucial information to public policy. Traditional methods - such as Physician Population Ratios (PPR) or shortest travel time - offer only a one-dimensional view of accessibility. This paper developed an improved indicator: the Index of Spatial Accessibility (ISA) to measure geographical healthcare accessibility at the smallest available infra-urban level, that is, the Ilot Regroupe pour des Indicateurs Statistiques.