Necessity of Considering Area and Size of a Region when Evaluating Local Health Services

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to propose that the area and size of a region should also be considered when analyzing, reviewing, and forecasting regional medical services in Japan. In this paper, the population coverage is calculated by dividing the population by the buffer distance from medical facilities by the number of people in the area. The number of medical institutions per unit area is generally lower in areas with relatively low population coverage. The population coverage correlates more strongly with the number of medical facilities per unit area than with the number of medical facilities per unit of population. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the data per unit area. It is significant to pay attention to population density alone, because there is a strong correlation between the number of medical institutions per area and population density.