HSTAT – Towards a Better Understanding of the Impact of Accessibility on Healthcare Reconfiguration Policies

The objective of this paper is to explore the issues of accessibility, social exclusion and transport poverty from the perspective of healthcare reconfiguration in the United Kingdom (UK). In particular, the paper examined, the development of HSTAT (a toolkit for analyzing the transport impact of changes to healthcare reconfiguration policies) and its role in providing a consistent method of modeling transport accessibility for healthcare reconfiguration proposals in detail. One of the key issues to emerge was the need for a consistent approach to modeling accessibility to avoid variations in measurement and analysis. HSTAT was designed to fulfill this requirement and has been embedded within the planning and reconfiguration of healthcare services within London. The paper also briefly looked at how such geographic information system (GIS) based accessibility modeling techniques such as HSTAT could be applied to the planning of healthcare in developing countries, particularly in rural areas. It found that there is considerable scope for utilizing or adapting such an approach in helping to plan and allocate resources more efficiently. In areas suffering from poverty and with poor access to healthcare facilities such an approach can have a direct and significant benefit on the health of people living in these communities.