Accessibility of health services as an important factor for sustainable development of cities and regions
Abstract
Shop, school, post office, doctor... The accessibility of these services is an important condition for many residents for the evaluation of the municipality with regard to quality of life and thus significantly determines the attractiveness of the place, respectively. of the region.
However, the number and composition of the population in municipalities is changing significantly, as are the conditions for the provision of these services, and it is often not in the power of local governments to maintain all services to a given extent. To what extent is it necessary, resp. sustainable is it often to have a dense network of health care providers? Are the providers' capacities large enough to provide care to such an extent that it is available to all residents within a few minutes? The paper approaches this issue on the example of selected outpatient health services (primary health care and selected specialties of outpatient health services), which discuss mainly the factors that affect the availability of these services in the region.
Attention was focused both on the providers of these services themselves and on the recipients, ie patients, resp. population in the territory. In particular, significant regional inequalities in the provision of these services, their concentration in large cities, were pointed out, which leads, among other things, to many residents / patients to the need to commute for selected health services.