Abstract
Hospital management in local areas is becoming more important due to the aging of the population and the spread of COVID-19. However, it is difficult to construct new hospitals in such areas because of the low utilization of high-cost medical equipment, an uneven distribution of doctors, and a restricted number of beds. In the future, however, medical services will improve if transportation policies and wide-area cooperation are strengthened, connecting the demand side, namely patients, and the supply side, namely hospitals. So far, the criteria such as the number of hospitals and the number of doctors has been used to evaluate regional medical services. However, in order to efficiently use limited medical resources, it is essential to have a bird’s-eye viewpoint, which cannot be evaluated by existing criteria. Instead of such criteria, new criteria to evaluate the accessibility of the patients who may cross municipal borders are proposed. As new criteria, we focus on accessibility to hospitals, using data on hospital locations and municipal boundaries for 44 municipalities in Ibaraki Prefecture. We analyze the reachable area considering crossing municipalities using ArcGIS Network Analyst. We also evaluate regional medical services by considering the area coverage and population coverage as the accessibility to hospitals. In addition, the existing criteria and the new indicators are compared in view of the continuity and the consistency of supply and demand times, and the correlation of the criteria with each other show that it is difficult for the existing criteria to replace the new criteria, and the new criteria is better than the existing criteria. Medical services are widely related to urban planning issues, including elderly care, welfare, and prevention of disasters. It is therefore essential to support medical services over a wide area.
