| Summary: | 碩士 === 元培醫事科技大學 === 醫務管理系碩士班 === 104 === Purpose: This study employed the Geographical Information System (GIS) as well as the status of healthcare resources provided on the official website of the Taoyuan City Government Department of Public Health in order to evaluate the spatial accessibility of medical resources in the Taoyuan region. Results of this study could be used as a reference when planning new healthcare systems or when deploying new medical resources.
Method: This study employed the ArcGIS 10.3.1 version to carry out GIS calculations, create graphs, analyze different areas, as well as perform one-way ANOVA in order to determine spatial accessibility of medical resources in Taoyuan City.
Results: According to the distribution of pediatrics and hospitals of regional-level or higher, administrative districts that lack medical resources tended to be more remote. As hospitals with pediatrics may also include an emergency medicine department according to the size of the hospital, the residents of Taoyuan City may find this type of medical service more accessible than pediatrics clinics. To those who live in remote areas, accessibility to medical resources would be lower. Although the deployment of automated external defibrillators (AED) and ambulances would be better distributed compared to other medical resources, districts such as Fuxing, Guanyin, Xinwu, and Daxi showed limited accessibility and lacked these resources. Of which, Fuxing District was found to be most deficient in these sources. Administrative districts were categorized according to the level of urbanization and then compared with one another within their respective categories. For newer townships and districts, Dayuan and Luzhu were found to be relatively lacking in medical resources. For general townships and rural districts, Daxi and Guanyin were found to be relatively lacking. Finally, for moderately urbanized districts, Longtan was found to be relatively lacking.
Discussions and recommendations: Results of this study were consistent with those conducted by Liu Chieh-Yu et al. in 2006 in terms of urbanization categories as well as the deployment of medical resources. However, this study made use of the improved ArcGIS program that was capable of clearly identifying differences between towns and districts with the same level of urbanization. When evaluating and analyzing various medical resources in different parts of Taoyuan City in the future, we recommend adopting the perspective of cross-regional resource integration to review improvement policies for administrative districts that lack medical resources. When formulating or deploying medical resources, remote regions should be prioritized over general districts in order to achieve the aims of even distribution and adequate use of medical resources.
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