Analysis on the inpatients spatial distribution function / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

Objective:The research aimed to figure out the geographic availability of the residence in the aspect of receiving health service thereby studying the spatial distribution regulation and the distance attenuation coefficient of the inpatients.It also provides the decision-making basis for the regional health planning.Methods: Select 23 medical institutions and randomly pick up patients from each of them, calculate the distance between the inpatients home and the medical institutions, then simulate the corresponding probability patients using the Geographical Infor-mation System ( GIS) .Perform a variety of curve fitting models according to the determination and simulation graph-ics coefficient choosing the most appropriate model, and draw corresponding the distance attenuation coefficient.Re-sultsAn exponential curve model is better than power curve model for the secondary medical institutions inpatients distribution and contrarily for those in the tertiary medical institutions.The mean distance attenuation coefficient was 0.51 for exponential curve model of secondary comprehensive medical institutions inpatients and its average was 0.50 for the secondary specialist medical institutions inpatients.The mean distance attenuation coefficient was 0.84 for the power curve model of the tertiary comprehensive medical institutions inpatient and its average was 0.53 for tertiary specialist medical institutions inpatients.Conclusion: The secondary medical institutions inpatient probable attenua-tion trends with distance are faster than in tertiary medical institutions, those for the comprehensive medical institu-tions inpatient are faster than in the specialist medical institutions.In the regional health planning, for different lev-els, categories of medical institutions should adopt different distance attenuation coefficients to calculate the health re-sources level.